In this intriguing collection of recipes, food journalist David Ricketts offers an international riff on home cooking. Starting with basic recipes that are familiar to all American home cooks, he presents variations of these dishes as they are prepared in other cultures. Chicken noodle soup becomes Vietnamese Chicken Noodle Soup with Fresh Herbs; beef stew, African Beef and Kale Stew with Pumpkin Seed Sauce; and rice pudding, Asian Black Rice Pudding. The taste difference is all in the local herbs and spices, not in the basic ingredients or cooking techniques. The resulting dishes - from Peru, Thailand, Greece, Scandinavia, and Morocco, among other countries - are tantalizingly familiar, yet enticingly exotic, with new flavor combinations that make each recipe a delicious adventure into another cuisine. Many of the wonderful comfort-food recipes in Home Cooking Around the World are ideally suited to our hectic pace of living. They are prepared in one pot or skillet and can often be left unattended while simmering. The cooking methods are simple and, for the few exotic ingredients, there is both a source listing and a glossary. Beginning cooks can use the book with ease, while experienced cooks will find new variations on familiar themes to expand their repertoires.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
People around the world wax rhapsodic about home cooking. But one would think the definition of home cooking would vary greatly from country to country. To the contrary, in Home Cooking Around the World David Ricketts shows that home-style favorites from far-flung places have more in common than you might expect. Ricketts has traveled the world during his long career as a food journalist--most notably as a staff editor of Food & Wine magazine--and discovered that the basic ingredients and techniques of home cooking remain much the same no matter how far you travel. The striking differences in cuisines lie not in such mundane factors as the type of meat you choose or what method you use to cook it, but rather in the herbs, spices, and other seasonings that differ from place to place.
In Ricketts's clever, international take on comfort food, Pot Roast gets a Middle-Eastern zing from ginger, cinnamon, turmeric, and apricots. New England Clam Chowder becomes Caribbean Sweet Potato Soup with Scallops, spicy with cloves, cardamom, and ground red pepper and rich with coconut milk. Even that Thursday night special, Tuna Noodle Casserole, gets a fanciful twist with the addition of curry powder--and the traditional canned soup is replaced with a luxurious mushroom and cream mixture made from scratch. Ricketts's desserts are equally deft at balancing the fine line between familiar and exotic: in Asian Black Rice Pudding, buttery-tasting palm sugar and smooth, rich coconut milk balance the toothiness of the Thai black sticky rice; a simple dish of roasted figs is brought to life by the sweet heat of candied ginger and the creamy richness of crème fraîche.
Charming stories of the author's extensive travels and the culinary discoveries they led to, along with Mark Thomas's gorgeous photographs, make the book feel like postcards from an old friend sending prized memories home for you to share. Most of the recipes are simple to prepare--many requiring just one pot and a long stovetop simmer--and a handy glossary and source list make finding even the more exotic ingredients a snap. --Robin Donovan --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
This compendium of international recipes emits a homey amateur air, and readers will find themselves longing to sample Ricketts's cooking. An editor and food writer, Ricketts has familiarized himself with many native cuisines and here offers simple, delicious recipes with flavors originating from locales as diverse as Albania, Ecuador and Bali. The book is organized in broad categories: Poultry, Seafood, Pork & Lamb (a combination which may estrange certain orthodox readers), etc. Each chapter contains a cheerful amalgam of world recipes Caribbean Sweet Potato Soup with Scallops appears alongside Bavarian Fish Stew with Vegetables and Vinegar. Ricketts, who seems fondest of Southeast Asian cuisines, practices a conscientious culinary affirmative action, dutifully including Irish Mashed Potatoes with Cabbage and a mostly-American Tuna Noodle Casserole, complete with cornflakes. With a few exceptions (pecans in the Chicken Pot Pie, star anise in the Czech Short Rib), he strives to reproduce authentic flavor combinations. The book is loaded with stews and braises, dishes that are both easy to embellish with complex ingredients and forgiving to struggling home cooks. Mark Thomas's gorgeous photography (even the redoubtable Tuna Noodle Casserole looks glamorous) partly compensates for the book's kitchen-unfriendly format. With a minuscule typeface and over-designed pages, the book doesn't have the trappings of a straightforward tribute to the soul food of many nations, though that's exactly what it is. Readers willing to brave the incongruous production values will be gratified to discover a fine down-home cookbook behind the gloss.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Making Your Kitchen Delightfully Global,
By John R. Leo, Ph.D. (Kingston, RI USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Home Cooking Around the World: A Recipe Collection (Hardcover)
This is a remarkably coherent and inviting book: it holds together as an actual workbook in the kitchen, as a compendium of user-friendly recipes to take us around the world, and as a concept. No surprises here. David Ricketts for years has been a food journalist and a cook, i.e. traveling, running test kitchens, and mastering the editorial arts of food writing and recipe preparation. These skills are everywhere at work in Home Cooking. For example, each recipe begins with "a basic recipe that is familiar to the American home cook," such as chicken noodle soup or bread pudding. Then the variations (Vietnamese Chicken Soup with Asian herbs and vegetables; bread baked with cream, eggs, coconut milk, and candied ginger). But Ricketts goes one step further. As he puts it, he's less interested in creating a "chemical reaction" and more concerned to explore how international "home cooking" is woven into the textures of people's everyday lives; his recipes are "a window" through which we "catch a glimpse of a culture, whether our own or another." Thus the method--to begin with a "known" or "familiar" dish and to go from there. (A helpful glossary and set of notes on ingredients is helpful here.)As a compass for international culinary voyaging the book is sensibly formatted and arranged; you get to your destinations and eating adventures composed and happy. Chapters cover poulty, beef, pork and lamb, seafood, vegetables, and desserts. Methods of cooking tend to favor one pot dishes (lots of soups, stews, braisings, and baked items), but the simplicity and variety is astonishing (some of my favorites: chicken legs in basque red pepper-prosciutto sauce; "Jansson's temptation" [a Danish edition of scalloped potatoes with anchovies, Vidalia onions, cream, and fennel seeds]; spicy corn and lima beans with tomato; baked honey-glazed mackerel; whew!). As I've been known to say to friends and family when I'm serving something I know they're going to moan over, "Grab it and growl, yo!"
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Affinities in the World's Home Cooking,
By A Customer
This review is from: Home Cooking Around the World: A Recipe Collection (Hardcover)
I tasted some recipes from this cookbook at a friend's dinner and found them delicious and comforting. Looking at the recipes, I was thrilled by the premise of the selected recipes that based on similar fundmentals, even ingredients, the results can turn out tasting entirely different from one culture to the next. Particualrly apropos in a multicultural United States, Mr. Ricketts enables an American raised on our Beef Stew to make with the slightest changes, cross oceans resulting in a Vietnamese Beef Stew with Carrots and Star Anise. This wonderful cookbook truly expresses the shared humanity of us all in a delicious way.
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
so easy to use, no wonder i didn't burn the kitchen down,
By A Customer
This review is from: Home Cooking Around the World: A Recipe Collection (Hardcover)
besides not finding a couple exotic ingredients at the local kroger- not a serious enough cook to order them- this book is absolutely, perfectly, marvelous! it's fun and easy to use and helps me to score when i invite a lady-friend over (or a guy friend). what else can you ask for out of a cookbook?
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