Best of Albanian Cooking: Favorite Family Recipes [Hardcover]

Klementina Hysa (Author), R. John Hysa (Author), Ramazan John Hysa (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1998

Located at the crossroads of East and West, Albania is a country whose culinary influences include Italy, Greece, and Turkey. This cookbook includes over 100 recipes for favorite Albanian dishes, covering every aspect of the Albanian meal. It features 14 chapters which cover inviting appetizers and condiments as well as ground meats, poultry, rabbit, vegetables, soups, fish, sauces, compotes, desserts, and refreshing drinks.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Hippocrene Books (May 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0781806097
• ISBN-13: 978-0781806091
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.3 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,813,826 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars This appears to be the ONLY English Language Albanian Cookbook, April 17, 2006

By 

Rarkm "rarkm" (Camp Hill, PA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Best of Albanian Cooking: Favorite Family Recipes (Hardcover)

I have been looking for an Albanian cookbook for several years now, and this appears to be the only one available. Thus I can hardly credit the first review that criticizes it and refers to "abundant" resources that the authors have overlooked.

Since Albania was shut out from the rest of the world for many years by one of the most repressive communist regimes in the world, it is perhaps not totally surprising that there aren't many English language resources on Albanian culture. The few recipes I've found on the web seem to mainly include close cousins of Middle Eastern staples such as Imam Bayaldi, khufta or tarator sauce.

Since this is the only current source of Albanian recipes and there aren't many Albanians in the US, this book will have to do until something better comes along. From the excerpts on this site, the book appears to have some interesting recipes, but little discussion of Albanian cuisine in general. The fragmented nature of Albanian history is probably reflected in their cooking, as the region has been repeatedly invaded and occupied by its neighbors over the millenia. Whether there is anything left of a historical, indigenous Albanian cuisine may be known by someone, but as far as I can determine, details are not available in any English publication.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, but not well written (edited), May 17, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Best of Albanian Cooking: Favorite Family Recipes (Hardcover)

Overall, I enjoyed this recipe book. However, many of the recipes do not appear to be well edited. On numberous occasions akward (non-native speaker?) language is employed, thereby making many of the recipes extremely confusing. Nonetheless, it was fun to experiment with many of the recipes.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Poor in many ways, December 22, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Best of Albanian Cooking: Favorite Family Recipes (Hardcover)

There are a number of problems with this book:

1) None of the two authors aparently, has any knowledge of the culinary art, and that is clearly reflected everywhere in this book. It is obvious that they haven't even researched the abandant resources of Albanian cooking.

2) The translation is far from professional, making it difficult to read.

3) The book is hard to follow because the instructions are vague, e.g. 1 package of x means nothing as a package can have various sizes.

4) Having visited Albania numerous times, and having an appeciation for their delicious cooking, I find this book nowhere near an Albanian cook book; e.g. the apperitives list is incorrect, with nothing in the list being a real Albanian apperitive. Erroneous content consists throughout the text, mainly as a result of authors' lack of culinary knowledge (turkey stuffed with chestnuts - never heard in Albania!!!).