Customer Reviews

The Exotic Kitchens of Indonesia: Recipes from the Outer Islands

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Honestly! Copeland Marks was a prolific pioneer in writing about "exotic" cuisines. In the 1980s and early 1990s I treasured his books about Guatemalan, Burman and Indonesian cooking (cuisines that, few, if any, other writers were covering at that time). Marks was widely traveled and wrote intelligent accounts of the the food he found. The reason he used substitutions in his recipes was, I'm sure, because many ingredients (pandanus leaves, for instance) simply were not available in the US when he wrote his cookbooks. Marks performed a valuable service documenting and introducing US cooks to exotic cusines. It's not fair to hold him to standards of "authenticity" that would have been impossible to achieve at the time he wrote.

Like in his book The Korean of the Morning: Classic Recipes from the Land of the Morning Calm, Copeland Marks presents recipes with inauthentic substitutions. For example, he feels vanilla extract and green food coloring are a perfectly suitable substitute for pandan extract. They are not. Perhaps the author is unaware that the internet and the explosion in interest in cooking have given most people access to lots of these 'exotic' ingredients, either by purchasing online or in specialty food stores. Plus, most medium to large cities have at least one asian grocery store which will supply one nicely with (nearly) everything needed to produce a broad range of cuisines.

In addition to lacking authenticity, the book does not adequately cover cooking techniques, cultural influences on food, ingredients or eating habits of the people of Indonesia.

Overall this book was inadequate and not worthwile. I welcome all suggestions for alternative sources!