Customer Reviews

The Basque Table: Passionate Home Cooking from One of Europe's Great Regional Cuisines

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Teresa Barrenechea's book allows you to revel in the sophistication of Basque cooking in your own home. Very aware that not everyone has the time to experiment with three course meals she also includes Basque tapas, or snacks. The recipes are simple to follow but remain authentically Basque - just as Teresa's food in her New York restaurant 'Marichu' is a must for any Basque or Spanish exile in New York longing for the tastes of home. Barrenechea is well known in Basque gourmet circles as the true ambassador of Basque cooking in the USA.

In Spain, Basque cooking is without doubt considered the cuisine with a more sophisticated heritage than any other, possibly because the Basques, more than any other people on the Iberian peninsula have long had a deep love affair with food! Many Basque cultural rituals center around food, such as the traditionally male-only cooking clubs.

Read Teresa's book if you want to taste one of Europe's best cuisines - and then come and visit us here!

Teresa Barrenchea's BASQUE TABLE is not about the Basque cooking of the American West, or about chic restaurant food produced by a chef with Basque roots. Rather, this book is about the authentic home cooking of the Basques of Spain. Since I'm generally familiar with Mediterranean cooking, many of the recipes sounded familiar to me at first. But, the more I read of Barrenechea's warm prose, the more I came to see Spanish Basque cooking as a unique cuisine, from a very special place indeed. And every time I try one of the recipes on my husband and kids, they claim a new family favorite. This book is getting a lot of use in my house!

"The Basque Table" author Teresa Barrenechea asserts that the Basques are even more enamored of food and cooking than the French. There is a strong seafood tradition here, as well as a hearty embrace of meat. A recipe for roast suckling pig is given, not to mention recipes for oxtails, braised rabbit, venison, and sundry organ meats. I didn't happen to have a suckling pig handy, but the pinchos (like Spanish tapas) I made from these recipes were yummy.

Co-author Mary Goodbody is, as I understand it, adept at putting non-American cookbooks into American terms for ease of use. If that was her job here, she did it superbly. There's nothing the average (or even slightly less than average) American cook can't try in "The Basque Table."

As for complaints that the book shows too much Spanish influence, all I can say is get out your globe and take a look. The Basques live wedged between Spain and France so it's entirely natural that their cuisine would be heavily influenced by those two countries. The beauty of the Basque cuisine is that it plucks what it likes from Spanish and French cooking and makes it wholly Basque.

Her Book is the best Basque Cook book on the market. We are a cooking equipment store and cooking school for the chef at home. Boise Idaho host the largest population of Basque people outside of Spain. He is exactly right with ingrediants and steps in preparing Basque Foods.

I bought this book when it first came out and was so happy to see a book on Basque cooking (there are so few written in English) and I was also influenced by all the 5 star reviews on this site. Well, after reading it carefully and preparing several recipes I feel let down. Not all the recipes are authentic Basque dishes - many are traditional Spanish dishes. Several recipes were quite bland and I can only imagine that you'd have to import the ingredients from the Basque country in order to get the results that Ms. Barrenechea describes. I am very dissapointed in this book and can not recommend it.

Having been exposed to the Basque culture while growing up in the Basque Country I can only congratulate Ms. Barrenechea for this wonderful book. I found in it all the dishes I was used to while at home elaborated in the same real and traditional way. This book really makes me feel closer to home.

The Basque Table: Passionate Home Cooking From One Of Europe's Great Regional Cuisines is an impressive collection of master-chef level recipes compiled by Teresa Barrenechea and arranged with the assistance of Mary Goodbody. Basque cuisine is an amalgam of diverse culinary influences including Tuscan, Sicilian, Burgundian, Provencal, and Spanish. From Pincho de Bonito Picante (Spicy Tuna Pinchos); Txangurro Donostiarra (Spider Crabs Donostia-Style); and Solomillo de Buey con Pimientos Rojos (Grilled Filet Mignon with Roasted Red Peppers); to Codornices in Salsa de Chocolate (Quails in Chocolate Sauce); Trucha a la Navarra (Trout Navarra-Style); and Higosy Brebas con Natillas (Figs with Natillas), The Basque Table offers exotic, palate pleasing dishes that are deliberately designed and presented so as to be thoroughly "kitchen cook friendly".

I do agree with Mr. Angel Ibañez de Aldecoa. I have been to her restaurant in New York and with great sorprise I found in her menus one of my favorites recipes whose owner and creator is one of my best friends in Madrid. She should be very careful about taking recipes from real chefs or at least recognice who the creator of the recipe is. I think this book has a wide range of recipes but some of them are Spanish and not exclusivly from BASQUE COUNTRY. I think the book could be better if she were a real professional chef with great experience.

I have been through her book and I found that there are some recipes which first are not really from her own creation. Some recipes are not just Basque recipes but also a very common spanish cuisine in any place of the Iberian Peninsula. Sometimes her making process is very very poor, like the TORTILLA DE PATATAS, for making that recipe you have a very special secret in order to get the most delisious and melted Tortilla, but maybe she just does not really know how to do it. by the way the Tortilla de patatas, is a Spanish dish not only Basque. It is a pitty that her recipes are not really taken from traditional basque farmhouses (caserios) in Guipuzcoa, Vizcaya, Alaba and Navarra. As she mentions the Roast Suckling Pig is a traditional dish from castile, why this recipe is in a book of Basque recipes ?. I do not think vinaigrette, mayonnaise, tomatoe sauce and the Spanish sauce, are basque recipes, specially the last on. The Piquillo Peper Sauce, it is a recipe of Nouvelle-cuisine, which never has heavy cream in the traditional way. Traditionally there was a puree made just eigther out of green Piquillo pepers or red ones (pepers from the area).

Marichu Restaurant in Manhattan as long been one of the city's best kept secrets. It has been open for four years and has still not been reviewed by either The New York Times or New York magazine. However, that has not kept some top gastronomic figures and chefs from discovering it, among them the editors of Conde Nast Traveler, Food & Wine, and Saveurmagazines and star chefs such as Park Avenue's David Burke, Windows on the World's Michael Lomonaco, Jean-Louis Palladin of Napa Restaurant in Las Vegas. Many other gourmets have been introduced to Barrenechea's food at prestigious James Beard Foundation events, in which she has been invited to cook on several occasions. Carlos Horno, the Director of Turespaña, Spain's Ministry of Tourism, has called Marichu, which is named for Barrenechea's mother and uses many family recipes from her kitchen, "the most authentic Spanish restaurant in the United States." Jean-Louis Palladin, himself one of the most highly ranked chefs in America, was so impressed by the authenticity of Barrenechea's Spanish Basque cuisine that, after dining at Marichu, he spent hours talking withthe chef and then invited her to Las Vegas to cook with him at Napa Restaurant during a gastronomic week that featured star chefs from around the country. After hours, Palladin had Barrenechea cook her Spanish and Basque specialties for the other chefs. Each time Barrenechea turned out a particularly appealing dish, Palladin would exclaim, "That one is for me." Barrenechea's first book, The Basque Table: Passionate Home Cooking from One of Europe's Great Regional Cuisines (Harvard Common Press), was published in October with advance orders for 10,000 copies. Publishers Weekly, the highly-respected periodical of the publishing industry, gave the book a coveted starred review and Barnes and Noble, America's most prestigious book stores, ordered a substantial number of copies. The book will also be featured by Book-of-the-Month Club's Good Cook division. On October 15, Spain's prestigious National Academy of Gastronomy went outside Spain to award the English-language The Basque Table their 1998 National Gastronomy Prize for Best New Publication. A few days later, Edouard Cointreau (of the famous Cointreau liqueur family), publisher of the International Cookbook Revue, announced that, out of several thousand cookery and food books entered from around the world in sixteen categories, The Basque Table had been awarded the prize for Best Regional Cuisine Book at the Fifth Annual Cookbook Fair Awards to be held in Périgueux, France in November. The Basque Table contains the recipes for many of the dishes you will find at Marichu, along with charming anecdotes and commentaries about the Spanish Basque country and its customs. The recipes, like some of the best food I have encounter in Barrenechea's homeland, are authentic renditions of deceptively simple dishes, which in the hands of Basque women chefs especially, are sublime evocations of all one could ask for in good European country cooking. In Barrenechea's native region are such culinary centers as the stunningly beautiful resort city of San Sebastián, which former New York Times restaurant critic Bryan Miller claimed was the best restaurant city per capita of any place outside New York. The tascas (tapas bars) in San Sebastián's old quarter, alone, constitute the densest concentration of bars in Europe, but the attraction here is the food as much as wine and beer. Then, there is a string of legendary restaurants in fishing villages and in towns hidden in the lush, green Basque mountains, which have inspired many a culinary pilgrimage. Barrenechea's home town of Bilbao was known for great seafood restaurants and asadores (restaurants featuring wood-grilled steak and fish) long before the Guggenheim Museum began to attract millions of visitors. I have eaten at the Manhattan restaurant (and the former Bronxville location) many times over the past several years and Barrenechea's cooking has made dining at Marichu one of my favorite culinary experiences in America. Many of her dishes are Basque and many are Spanish, but either way, they are the closest thing I have found to the real food of Spain in this country. In fact, some of her dishes, such as tortilla española (the potato omelet that is truly the Spanish national dish, not paella), gambas al ajillo (shrimp sizzled in hot olive oil with garlic), and salmorejo (a thick Cordoban-style gazpacho) are hard to top even in Spain. Other dishes such aspimientos de piquillo rellenos de bacalao (piquillo red peppers stuffed with brandade), rodaballo (pan-roasted turbot), and chipirones en su tinta (squid in an onion-flavored, squid ink- colored sauce) transport me back to The Basque Country itself. - - ©1998 Gerry Dawes, Restaurant Critic (The Journal News, Westchester, NY) Gannett Suburban Newspapers