Customer Reviews

Celtic Folklore Cooking

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I agree with the other reviews, and there is not much I can add but I had to vote on it regardless.

I am allergic to yeast I was delighted to discover a book with bread recipes that do not contain yeast, I have since learnt that, in the past, nobody used yeast in bread, it is actually an inferior mass-production method to use yeast to make bread rise.

After buying the book, I was astounded to see so many wonderful references to Celtic heritage. It was wonderful.

The reason I did not give it 5 stars is because I believe some full colour photos of the meals would be nice ... although, at the same time, might detract from the wonderful country feel of the book.

I would say this is a very good present for anyone remotely interested in anything Celtic + cooking, it has a wonderful feel to it, warm, enchanting, entertaining you can actually browse through the little tidbits.

Absolutely wonderful. I love this book, and everything I have tried out of it has been a smashing success. If you are born again, or object to Pagan references I recommend you look elsewhere, the food is good, but there are pagan references and history of culture that you will not apreciate. For everyone else, understand, this book is full (and I do mean FULL) of recipes from our (Celtic) forfathers, and some from our contemporaries. Mincemeat Parcels with whipped cream, Michaelmas Goose with Sage and Onion Stuffing (delectable), Homemade Irish Cream, Eggnog (nummy), Poacher's Pie, Irish Stew (2 Variations), Venison Soup, Venison Roast, Saffron Cakes, Faerie Cakes, Herbed Honey and Herbed Butter, recipes for making Heather Wine and Dandilion Wine, Spiced Whiskey and non-alcoholic homemade eggnog, Scones and more!
Baked Onions, Cockle and Mussel Stew, Dublin Lawyer (Lobster), Baked Salmon, Roast Pheasant, Duck in Spiced Oranges, Whiskey Fried Steak, Welsh Bubble and Squeak and sooooo much more!!
And sandwiched in between it all, folk stories and history. I LOVE this book!! I can't help but highly recommend it. Enjoy!!

I'll say right off the bat that this will be a book you'll either love or hate. There isn't another cookbook quite like it, so it's really hard to make comparisons. I personally think its terrific, and my coven has used it on a number of occasions. We've had good luck with the citrus curd, crescent moon rolls, soda bread, tea brack, and baked trout among others. Yum! Asala has taken on the gargantuan task of suggesting traditional Celtic dishes for the festivals of the wheel of the year: Beltane, Samhain, Yule, etc. Some of these dishes do stem from the earliest days of recorded history, others are obviously more recent in origin, so a purist may find it inappropriate to call this a "pagan" cookbook. Still, all religions, even reconstructionist neo-paganism, are fluid in nature and are constantly changing. What's important is the "now." You may still observe the "old" holidays by using "modern" Irish recipes. The recommendations are Asala's own, and I feel they have a lot of merit. She has also managed to distill a lot of other information into one convenient format. The proverbs and songs, especially, can be found in a dozen different collections. But I think she has presented them in a new way by placing them with recipes that they enhance. For example, if one of the recipes has "milk" as the main ingredient, she has linked it with a proverb about cows or milking or added a bit of folklore about cows. So I consider this book as a good jumping off point into celtic mythology and culinary history. If you want to learn just about the foods, find a book that is strictly a cookbook. If you want to learn more about folk sayings, check out an old proverb collection or poetry book like Carmina Gadelica. But if you want to find new, creative ways to celebrate the gods and goddesses than this is the book for you. Even if you don't agree with everything she says, there is enough Celtic pagan and Christian folklore to entertain and inform any reader -- and I can say for myself the food is great!

`Celtic Folklore Cooking' by culinary writer and folklorist, JoAnne Asala of Chicago is truly unique among the 500 some cookbooks I have reviewed over the last two and a half years. The only books that come close to it in combining spiritual and culinary worlds are the books on Jewish Holiday cooking. In some ways, Ms. Asala's book deals with things which are less alive today than the very active world of Judaism, since virtually no one except wannabe witches or druids make the lore in this book a part of their everyday life. But, that glib summary of our Celtic heritage today ignores two strong influences where Celtic lore still works on our psyches from behind centuries of misty influence.

The first and more subtle influence is the effect of Celtic lore on the placing of our Christian holidays. Practically every single Christian and Secular holiday, including Christmas, Easter, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Carnavale / Marti Gras, Lent, and Advent can be traced to the mapping of Christian doctrine onto the pre-existing Celtic agricultural calendar. One can almost feel the palpable shadow of great Stonehenge, that early instrument for tracking that calendar, weighing on our imagination on Spring, Midsummer, Autumn, and Midwinter celebrations. While it is quite beyond the scope of this book and this review, one can wonder how the Celts in the damp north influenced the Greek and Roman based early Christianity, but it obviously did, in no small way.

The second great influence is more obvious today than it may have been for over a century. This is the presence of Celtic iconography in some of our most important modern interpretations of ancient myths, recently enshrined in all their celluloid splendor in the `Lord of the Rings' trio of movies and in the `Chronicles of Narnia' which promises to begin another movie series franchise. These two works by J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis respectively were written by scholars of ancient Celtic and Nordic languages and literature, who happened also to be great friends and influenced one another's writing. Other major repositories of the Celtic influence on literature are the fairy tales of the Grimms and Shakespeare.

While this overlay of folklore on culinary traditions may not interest some people, even people in search of the best Irish cookbook, it opens up the book to an audience which may not be all that interested in the average or even the better than average cookbook, because it does offer a connection between both the Christian and pre-Christian pagan calendar to the agricultural and festival year. This fills in for Christianity that major connection Judaism has between food and religious tradition.

While this book promises a `Celtic' cookbook, it intentionally leaves out part of the historic Celtic homeland which traditionally includes Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England (especially Cornwall), Brittany (in France) and Galacia (in Spain). It concentrates on the British Isles. It also recognizes that the basis of culinary tradition in these regions is also heavily influenced by Norse, Roman, and Saxon influences, let alone the introduction of New World vegetables such as the potato.

The first 24 pages of the book are a survey of the Celtic lunar year of agricultural milestones. This section is liberally sprinkled with tales of famous Celtic stories, but it's most dramatic effect is to show us how much of our Christmas, Halloween, Easter, and May Day festivals owe to Celtic traditions.

The first fully culinary chapter gives us recipes for drinks, heavily based on beer, honey, and cream. From this one would thing the Eire has a far greater claim to the `land of milk and honey' than does Israel. One of the more interesting little factoids in this chapter is the fact that the recipe for Irish coffee is quite modern, having been invented by an Irish chef in the 1940s.

The remaining chapters cover:

Breads, Porridges, and Breakfast Foods
Milk, Eggs, and Cheese
Soups and Stews
Vegetables
Fish, Shellfish, and Seaweed
Meat and Wild Game
Desserts

With the great tradition in the British Isles for breakfast dishes and dishes containing oatmeal, plus the development of quickbread scones and other breads, this book is a great resource for people needing new things to serve at breakfast. We get here the origin of the religious symbolism behind hot cross buns, a major tradition for Easter baking. It began not as a Christian symbol but as an offering to the Saxon Goddess Eostre (get the connection!) worshipped by the Greeks, Romans, Germans, Franks, and Anglo-Saxons (although the Greek / Roman image for this goddess may have been Ceres). For those with a literary bent, this and other chapters include great recipes for the celebration of Midsummer's Night, made most famous by Shakespeare's great play `A Midsummer's Night Dream'. For those whose interest is entirely culinary, I am happy to say that all measurements are American friendly, using our traditional cups and spoons. I also find the cooking directions to cover all the usual cautions about handling ingredients and testing for doneness.

The good culinary sense extends to the next chapter with its chicken stock recipe that is neither overly fussy nor overly long.

One of the best aspects of the Dessert chapter is that it includes many very good recipes using apples. Not only is Normandy famous for its apples, but it seems these little beauties are also a speciality of Eire, as every Irish cookbook I have seen recently features apples in many savory and sweet recipes. There are also several recipes that sound like they are straight out of the early chapters of `The Hobbit' and `Lord of the Rings'.

A pure foodie may be bored or annoyed by folklore material, but I encourage all people who love seasonally appropriate dishes to buy this book immediately and relish the great heritage gleaned from our Celtic traditions.

First, the folklore elements to this book were somewhat laughable, particularly the bit about "heather wine." For those who want to know the folklore behind this, the story is called "The Viking Ale" or "The Scottish Ale" depending on version, and is the subject of one of the studies in Viking Ale: Studies on Folklore Contacts Between the Northern and the Western Worlds by Bo Almqvist. It's a pretty cool story, but bears no resemblance to the discussions in that book. (Almqvist suggests that the story is in fact a Celtic tale inspired by portions of the Volsung Saga, which might have been heard by Irishmen or Scotsmen from Vikings).

So it's not really based much on folklore. And with all the nutmeg and other exotic spices, I can hardly call it Celtic. But it is cooking so I suppose one of the three words in the title is correct.

This being said, despite the misleading title, I suppose this was a book that was supposed to give Wiccans some creative cooking tips for neo-Celtic-themed dishes to serve during get-togethers and maybe some inspiration into how to weave herbal folklore into cooking. I suppose for that it's not so bad.

The book could use a proper title, such as "Wiccan cooking." That might help prevent some people from being disappointed.

I rated this 3 stars because I suppose some people will get some use out of it (I won't).

This book is yet another insult to Celtic culture, in disguise as a "cookbook". Some of these recipes aren't even Celtic, and the "ancient folklore" she cites has nothing to do with the recipes. The only vaguely valid recipes are the bannocks for certain holidays. Otherwise, it's just a conflagration of Neo-Wiccan nonsense. Even in the intro she tries to present some sort of Matriarchal Great Goddess story, and then associate the ancient Celts(how many times do we have to kill this myth before it dies?). The word "Celtic" is only in the title to win the favor of the gullible New Agey type. If you want a Celtic cookbook, go buy one. If you want a load of New Age tripe, go buy that. But for the sake of all that is holy, haven't the Celts suffered enough??

This book gives the tales that go along with the recipes. Iam drawn to the Celts and just had to get this book. I am a vegetarian, so there isn't much in this book that I can make except for maybe the breads, and some of the drinks & vegetable dishes. If you want heavy food loaded with cream and wild game this book is for you. I enjoyed it for the story telling and the explaination of why certain foods were eaten at certain times. The Celts are a mixture of Pagans & Christians so there are tales, folklore and info on both faiths as well.

I have purchased this book 5 times now. My friends fall in love with my copy and I end up letting them have it. The recipes and stories are wonderfull. And the food is simply delightful. I have taken to ordering 3 at a time so that I can keep a copy on hand!...

The author starts the book by saying that one of her favorite things to do is read a good cookbook before going to bed. Well, that kind of devotion and interest to cookbooks is what makes this book such a wonderful blend of old recipes, old folklore, old songs, and old proverbs such a wonderful read! I have to admit my biggest problem was deciding if I should store this book in my cupboard with my other cookbooks, of if I should keep it in my Pagan Library for reference. :)

Most of the recipes are absolutely mouthwatering, and when you bake up a tasty meal from using recipes from this book, you can't help but feel a connection to the old Celtic people who used to prepare similar meals hundreds of years ago. And I never realized how much fun it is to prepare a recipe alongside a short blurb of how that recipe was used or "came to be". It makes for a great conversation at the dinner table. And to see how the recipe was prepared compared to how it's prepared today is just fascinating.

I have to admit a few of their tips were slightly shocking (I can't remember which recipe it was that used to be prepared by stirring it with the dismembered hand of a hanged criminal for extra flavor) to the point where I wasn't all that interested in eating the food, and a few of the recipes were slightly bland for my taste (easily fixed though). Also, some of the recipes call for slightly exotic ingredients (and slightly disgusting ingredients, like animal organs and such), but you can't deny that at least they're giving you the traditional recipe!! :)

Overall, this is a great book with wonderful history and folklore in it. Even if you won't use it for cooking, pick it up for quick facts about Celtic cooking history and folklore.

With a delicious pinch of wry wit, a dollop of common sense, a large measure of Irish legend and enough flavor to fill the countryside, Joanne Asala has captured the sweet treasure at the end of the rainbow in Celtic Folklore Cooking. From the rich simplicity of Apples in Red Wine for Samhain to Marigold Pudding to celebrate Midsummer, she's created a charming, earthy, melt-in-your-mouth compendium of exquisite recipes that are easy to follow and coincide beautifully with this hedgewitch's idea of great food. Spiced with flair and fun, Asala's style and storytelling are as genuinely palatable as the recipes are edible. As engaging as any novel, this is also one bedtime read that promises (and delivers) sweet dreams that come in every flavor!