Customer Reviews

The Best of Croatian Cooking

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This book covers all regions of Croatia! The dessert chapter is comprehensive and includes some desserts made with chestnut puree, my all time favorite! I visited the web site and was pleasantly surprised to see comments by Croatian celebrities endorsing the book! I also felt good buying the book knowing that some of the proceeds are going to "Warchild". The book makes a great wedding shower gift too...I'd originally purchased it for my best friend but I've also bought one for myself too! A great way to re-connect with our Croatian roots and learn to cook like our mothers and "babas"

`The Best of Croatian Cooking, Expanded Edition' by Liliana Pavicic and Gordana Pirker-Mosher is published as a member of `The Hippocrene Cookbook Library' which seems to focus on all those national and regional cuisines which will appeal to a sizable emigrant population, but which is not covered by the mainstream foodie literati. This would be just about everything except French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, `Mediterranean', Moroccan, Indian, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, German, Russian, Turkish, Lebanese, and Jewish cooking. Their real forte is for small central and eastern European nationalities such as Hungarian, Czech, Polish, Slovak, Ukrainian, and Bulgarian cooking. I am especially drawn to several of these national cuisines, having some relatives from Hungary and Slovakia.

The problem with these books in general and with this volume in particular is that amateurs in both culinary skills and journalistic or scholastic skills write them. We are not reading minor league Paula Wolferts here. That is not to say there is nothing of value here. In fact, the intellectual discoveries one can make in this book may be even more interesting than the culinary ones. Croatia lies squarely in the confluence of three culinary dynamos. Directly to the west is Italy, especially the leading culinary region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia. To the north is Vienna, the capitol of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, of which Croatia was a part for several centuries. To the south is Greece and Turkey, the heart of the old Ottoman Empire who was Croatia's landlord before the Austrians took over. So, Croatian cuisine is a great gemish of world class influences, with a bit to add on its own, being, like Friuli-Venezia Giulia, a fertile site for grape growing and, therefore, wine making.

The authors take seriously their interest in giving a good picture of the regional cuisines of Croatia, except that they fail to handle this task effectively. Their first lapse is that they neglect to include a map of modern Croatia. I would consider this a flaw even in a book about well-known Italy. When you are covering Croatia, the omission is deadly, since the modern borders are highly irregular, shaped as it is like an hourglass tilted at a 45 degree angle, with its base on the Adriatic. When I checked my trusty Oxford Atlas of the world, I saw things of which this book gave me little inkling. And yet, it was not much help, as the book deals with provincial names, which are very difficult to see on a small-scale map.

The next failing is that they don't identify the regional source of the various recipes, after going to so much trouble to identify the culinary characteristics of each province, they don't say from which province each recipe comes. It would be very interesting to know if a strudel recipe comes from a province closer to Vienna or closer to Greece.

Speaking of strudel, the one reason I would buy this book is because it has a recipe for both strudel dough and for cabbage strudel. This reason is not compelling, as if you already own Rose Levy Beranbaum's `The Pie and Pastry Bible', you already have a whole chapter of strudel, but our authors give us a fair approach, but few tips if things go wrong. For that, you will need to go to Beranbaum.

Since we are at the confluence of three very well known cuisines, there is really very little here which is new to the experienced culinary eye. There are novelties, especially among the simpler dishes, so that the book may be a truer picture of the cuisine of poverty than most books on Italian cuisine, but the similarities are such that if you already have lots of Italian cookbooks, especially Lydia Bastianich's `La Cuisine di Lydia', you will not get much that is new (Bastianich grew up in Istria, which is now part of Croatia).

My last comment is that I think the authors may have gone just a bit too far from their roots to standard American cooking practice in that their most common cooking fat is `cooking oil'. I am willing to bet that the traditional Croatian cook, like their Italian and Greek neighbors primarily used either olive oil, pumice oil, lard, or butter, not corn or safflower oil.

If I were to pick a single recipe that makes this book worthwhile for the cookbook collector, it would be the squid and potato salad, in spite of the fact that the title and ingredients say `squid' and the procedure says `cuttlefish'. This is just another dropped detail which makes the book less than perfect.

Recommended for the foodie cookbook collector. Highly recommended it you have a Croatian background.

Before my trip to Croatia I wanted to become acquainted with Croatian cuisine. Also, I collect cookbooks from my travels, so this way I had the book in hand BEFORE I left and didn't have to search for it in Croatia. I have already tried several recipes which are simple and good. I was pleased with my purchase.

My Croatian husband has a little trouble getting these recipes to come out right and he is an excellent cook. Some of the ingredients are difficult to find where we live (in the States) and sometimes the instructions are unclear. He made that rum cake recipe and it just tasted like pure rum. The cake was beautiful but tasted awful. The recipe for the crepes is delicious though!

Coming from a Croatian raised eating home cooked Croatian meals all his life this book is great.

Croatia's turbulent history has resulted in a varied cuisine seldom reflected in regional cookbooks, and The Best of Croatian Cooking provides an excellent selection of over 200 dishes from classic main courses to desserts. Recipes have been modified for easy preparation and American kitchens but are filled with appeal and retain their cultural authenticity.

If you need to keep the Croatian culture in the family, you need to have this book on home!

There alot of receipes that include pork or are pork. You can subsitute lamp or beef for some. The book is very imformative though. Some receipes come with little back grounds on where they come from and their use in holidays. So if you eat pork. Good book. If not.. Well it's still has some good stuff in it.

This was said to be a $299 book and I paid $55 for a used copy - on the book cover it is priced $24.95 - the recipes are unusable as most of the meats and ingredients are unavailable in the US. I wrote the store where the book came from and, needless to say, did not hear back from them. I will not order any other books online until I have actually looked at them someplace.