Customer Reviews

The Chilean Kitchen

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I preordered this a few months ago, while looking for books on Chilean cooking. It was a very pleasant surprise when the book arrived this week.

I cannot over emphasize how good this book is! While my wife brought several cookbooks from her native Chile, we've frequently been challenged to find many ingredients here in the US. With this book I can now prepare all of my Chilean favorites. THANK YOU to Ruth Van Waerebeek for this stellar work!

To be clear: this is far more than just a book full of recipes. Wonderfully organized and illustrated, each recipe includes engaging stories about the culture and culinary traditions of Chile. Special sections provide great detail on the unique ingredients and cooking techniques of Chile, and let us norteamericanos know where to find these foods (or close substitutions) in our local markets.

This book is a pleasure to read; the recipes are well detailed and easy to follow (with ingredient names in English and US measures); full of compelling stories. This is the only cookbook that I've ever read cover to cover.

Ruth Van Waerebeek-Gonzalez beautifully combines her affection and passion for Chile with her talents as a top-rate chef and foods author to deliver the definitive English text on Chilean cuisine. I plan to buy several more copies to share with my friends and family, to further introduce them to delicious Chilean cooking.

I have also read _Three Generations of Chilean Cuisine_ by Mirtha Umana-Murray. While this is a good book, _The Chilean Kitchen_ is by far the better work.

VIVA CHILE!

Chileans love 'home cooking' and this book does good job of representing typical foods. As in any so-called national cuisine, there are nearly as many recipes as there are cooks, so while her version may not match my mother-in-law's, they're both in the same ball park. I like the author's conversational style of providing cultural commentary in relation to the foods she is presenting. My primary criticism however has more to do with careless translations than with her ingredient lists. The traditional Christmas drink, "Cola de Mono," was translated as "Monkey's Tale" rather than "Monkey's Tail." While perhaps annoying to the bilingual reader, the recipes themselves are worth-while for an insight into Chilean home cooking.

I have dined in homes and restaurants from the north of Chile to the south, and the recipes in this book accurately reflect much of the cuisine. Chile has an outstanding culinary tradition and Ruth Van Waerebeek-Gonzalez understands it. The dishes listed are not only authentically Chilean, but are also dishes that most people in the United States will enjoy.

As a chilean living in the united states, i have always tried get the recipes that my family in chile know. When I found this book I thought to myself, "great!" But these are not the foods I ate growing up. Some of the recipes are just wrong. Maybe it is just where the author got recipes i dont know, but I been up and down that coast and havent seen food that match some of these. Still, if you want a taste of chilean culture, and a basic unstanding. You cant go wrong with it. Just my 2 cents.

<The Chilean Kitchen> is a practical guide to Chilean cookery, unadorned by glossy paper and the dilutions of too many side-stories that seem to characterize many cookbooks. Some of the sidebars don't even relate very much to food but do offer a glimpse of Chilean rural life. The lack of photos or even drawings of the meals also differs from what must be the prevailing standard in cookbooks for the North American market. There are also some minor technical errors, mostly in the Chilean Spanish spellings, but ironically even in some of the English. It is also evident that the author has concentrated on the central region of Chile since some of what must be conjecture about how people live and eat in Chilean Patagonia is amusing, roughly analogous to saying that people in Arizona survive by eating wild pigs and rattlesnakes. Generally, the recipes contain the ingredients readily available in North America, with English System units (ounces, cups, etc.,) but both Celsius and Fahrenheit cooking temperatures. <Chilean Kitchen> is the sort of book you will get after you have had a pleasant visit to Chile and want to replicate some of what you enjoyed eating there.

Chilean Kitchen: Authentic, homestyle foods, regional wines, and culinary traditions of Chile

By Ruth Van Waerbeek-Gonzalez

Reviewed by Liz Waters Copyright 1999, All Rights Reserved

Touted as the first comprehensive, contemporary cookbook of Chilean cuisines, this book proves that there is a lot more to Chilean cuisine that sea bass. Like other South American cuisines, Chile's is complex as it is a fusion of European, American and native American cuisines, utilizing native ingredients and the traditions of the many cultures whose explorers visited this land that lies between the Andes mountain range and the Pacific Ocean. Tastes from the mountains and the seacoasts merge in many unique and exciting dishes.

The book also recommends exquisite Chilean wines to accompany the meals presented in it. Ms. Waerbeek-Gonzales has definitely opened some culinary doors with this exciting new book

Delicious, rustic, unpretentious, heartfelt, real. Those are some of the adjectives that Ruth Van Waerebeek-González's The Chilean Kitchen brings to the mind of this non-chef reader. The love of the land and of the people seems to have led the author to the wonderful flavors found in the family kitchens where food is shared "in the Chilean style, celebrating their simplicity and serving them with a big heart." The recipes are easy to follow and authentic; they invariably evoke in me vivid images of wonderful meals around my grandmother's table as they bring up the hearty and delicious flavors of long ago. Chilean cuisine sometimes requires quite a bit of patience, yet other times a delicious dish can be produced with little effort. Whatever the case, the gustatory results are beautifully rewarding.

Van Waerebeek-González acknowledges that no two Chilean cooks will agree on any one way to prepare certain dishes, but her recipes do get to the heart of the real Chilean cuisine. I thought the book was, in its own way, an ode to the Chilean kitchen as Neruda's Odas Elementales are to bountiful vegetables and to "caldillo de congrio," a translation of which is found on pp. 114-115. I love the introductions to each recipe: They prepare your senses while providing you with cultural as well as emotional involvement. The sections on Chilean fruits and wines-"the fruits of the vine"-are very informative and provide yet another avenue to cultural appreciation of a country of majestic mountains, prodigious gardens, and generous Pacific waters. This extraordinary lady from Ghent, Belgium, found in Chile the land she had never known but had always loved and wanted to go back to. The Chilean Kitchen is the fruit of that love.

I found this to be a wonderful cookbook! I tried the "Arroz con Pollo" and it was delicious! I love to cook, but I think for one who is not a avid cook this is still very easy!

El mejor libro de cocina chilena...
Muy bien organizado, claro, específico, bien documentado. Por estar escrito en inglés, le da además una proyección internacional a la cocina chilena.
Yo he preparado varias de sus recetas con excelentes resultados.
Felicitaciones para la autora y gracias.

There are plenty of cookbooks on Mexican, French, Italian and many other ethnic cookery. Almost every collection of cookbooks has at least on of those in their repertoire. Now the Belgium born author of Everyone Eats Well in Belgium has taken her husband's ethnic background to write a cookbook on Chilean Cuisine. Ruth Van Waerebeek-Gonzalez has titled her second cookbook The Chilean Kitchen and has focused on "authentic, homestyle foods, regional wines, and culinary traditions of Chile".

There are a few very long recipes that have broken my cardinal rule of cookbooks - having to turn the page to finish a recipe - however, in general the recipes are designed to be simple and somewhat easy to follow for the experienced cook or a beginner.

Though this is a Chilean cookbook, I found that most of the ingredients are readily available at most markets, and the possibly harder-to-find ingredients have options. Some of the recipes include: Seafood in a Hot, Garlicky Sauce; Spicy Shrimp in Fresh Tomato Sauce; Romaine Omelet Flavored with Bell Pepper and Caramelized Onion; Artichokes Stuffed with Tuna Fish and Celery Salad; Creole Salsa; Swiss Chard, Egg, and Olive Salad; Cream of Corn Soup with Basil and Tomatoes; Rich Chicken Broth with Polenta Dumplings; Rice with Razor Clams and Spicy Sausage; Grilled Sea Bass with Cheese, Oregano, and Chorizo; Baked Beans with Pumpkin and Bell Peppers; Wine-Flavored Soft Meringue with Crème Anglaise; Fried Bow-Tie Pastries; Poached Figs with Walnuts and Sliced Bananas with Maple Syrup.

This book is filled with over 130 recipes which give us a sample of the Chilean cuisine and show the influences of many other culture on their adaptations of foods. There is a section in the back of the book that cover the regional wines if Chile, and several recipes have a variation suggestion. Though each section has a short historical background behind the upcoming recipes, I would have like to seen a little more personalization to each recipe and the family background or maybe her husband's memories behind them. A few pictures or illustrations throughout the book would have also been appealing.

This book is for the cook who likes to cook a little different then Mexican foods. Penguin Putnam's Berkley Publishing and HP books division is the publisher of the Chilean Cookbook. I can only wonder of book number three with be a new fusion of Chilean and Belgium cooking.

Review 3 out of 5 pots