Customer Reviews

Lebanese Cuisine: More Than 250 Authentic Recipes From The Most Elegant Middle Eastern Cuisine

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book fell short of my expectations. I have tried many of the recipes and doubt that I would make any of them again. Some recipes don't work at all. Both the Pomegranate Syrup Sauce and Candied Apricot Ice Cream sounded interesting but yielded results that were virtually inedible. Also, there are no recipes for basic items such as pita and marqouq bread or for many favorite preparations like artichokes in olive oil, grilled or fried trout, maqloubi, roast lamb, stuffed turkey (a Christmas tradition in Lebanon), pine nut sauce, khoushaf, and barazik.

Readers cannot gain an overview of Lebanese cuisine from this book. There is no information on daily meals and no menus. In her discussion of appetizers, Ms. Helou doesn't explain the philosophy behind the partaking of mezze or that it is customarily accompanied with araq in Christian communities. Although the author includes recipes for fried and scrambled eggs as well as a recipe for an Arab omelet, she says nothing about hard-cooked or poached eggs or the local version of the French omelet, all of which are prepared in delicious and unusual ways. She also neglects to explain how the Arab omelet differs from the French one. In her chapter on fish, Ms. Helou fails to mention the varieties of saltwater fish favored by the Lebanese, for example Sultan Ibrahim (red mullet). Nor is there any mention of the much-prized flat lobsters. There is also nothing said about the country's freshwater fish (such as trout) or about frogs' legs, snails, or batarekh (boutargue). In her discussion of desserts, the author neglects to mention that Tripoli has long been celebrated for its sweets, that nammoura is a specialty of Zahleh, and that Sidon is famous for sanyoura and barazik.

There is little or no information on such ingredients as pomegranates and pomegranate molasses or syrup, grape molasses, fresh nuts in season (almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts, and pistachios), fresh green chickpeas, fava (broad) beans, skinless whole-grain wheat, phyllo pastry, soapwort, and sumac juice. Furthermore, some of the ingredient information is incorrect. For instance, habbat al-barakeh (nigella) is wrongly identified as black cumin (a common error), shirsh el-halaweh (soapwort) as bois de Panama, and very fine bulgur (sreyseerah) is more than once referred to as f'reyfeerah.

There are other inconsistencies. For example, Ms. Helou writes that stuffed vegetables are always served with a bowl of yogurt. Actually, those that contain a vegetarian stuffing based on rice and olive oil are not customarily accompanied with it. A recipe for potato pie, which contains no bulgur and has nothing to do with potato kibbeh, is wrongly identified as Kibbet Batatah!

Don't be misled by the jacket reviews of this book. Regrettably, it is neither "fully comprehensive" nor a "major work."

With its emphasis on grains, dried legumes, fresh fruits and vegetables, and olive oil, the Lebanese diet is a nutritious one that provides the health-conscious cook with many appealing choices. This book presents recipes for wholesome and satisfying traditional dishes adapted for the modern kitchen. They cover all courses of the meal and range from rustic to elegant. Some of the dishes, as to be expected, are complicated and labor intensive, but the majority are simple to prepare and demand no special culinary skills. Most of the ingredients are available in supermarkets, and the food is not expensive.

Also recommended: "Recipes and Remembrances from an Eastern Mediterranean Kitchen: A Culinary Journey through Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan," by Sonia Uvezian. This landmark volume is an indispensable addition to the library of anyone interested in Middle Eastern cooking.

`Lebanese Cuisine' By Lebanese / British culinary author Annisa Helau, author of the more recent and more widely popular `Mediterranean Street Food' is a good, if somewhat flawed presentation of an important cuisine of , in the author's emphasis, the `true' middle east.

For starters, this book is much better than some works on local cuisines of, say, Poland, Hungary, the Philippines, and Latvia which were written twenty to fifty years ago and may still be lurking on the shelves of your library in rebound, dusty editions with nothing more than one skimpily described recipe after another. One of the benefits of the renewed interest in traditional food is that the bar has been raised for writing about all ethnic cuisines, primarily by the very important works on Italian regional cuisine and works on African and Middle Eastern cooking by Paula Wolfert and Claudia Roden. And, while Ms. Helou obviously has an enormous amount of respect for Ms. Roden's important `The New Book of Middle Eastern Food', Ms. Helou takes issue with Ms. Roden on including Egypt, properly part of Africa rather than being in western Asia, the `true' middle east.

Ms. Annisa Helou begins her book with a brief but nice outline of Lebanese history. The land began as the home of the Biblical Canaanites, who became the great merchants and alphabet inventors, the Phoenicians. Since then, they have been the proverbial welcome mat over which walked the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks, and French. With all these landlords, the conclusion is that the Lebanese cuisine is one of the most interesting in the region. The cover, in fact, proclaims this as `250 recipes from the most elegant Middle Eastern cuisine'. I confess that it may be one of the most varied, but the degree to which hands are required as cooking and eating utensils tends to keep me from enlisting in this idea. And, while the author claims that the recent 25 year French protectorate of Lebanon laid the typically immense imprint of French cuisine on Lebanese cooking, I cannot easily see if from the recipes in this book. It seems to have much more in common with its Arab neighbors, including Egypt, than with the land of Escoffier.

On reading the first three chapters on `hors d'oeuvres', salads, and soups, I began to think there was simply nothing special going on here. So many things seemed like variations on Italian and Greek dishes such as the bread and tomato salads so reminiscent of panzanella. Things started picking up in the chapter on savory pastries. While any pop food commentator worth his salt will point out that stuffed dough dumplings are found the world around, the fact that we find them in an important niche of Lebanese cuisine is very interesting and a good source of recipes worthy of an earnest foodie conversation. In Lebanon, the roles of Ricotta and pork of Italy are taken by yogurt and lamb. While the author points out that until recently, the majority of the population of Lebanon has been Christian and not Arab or Jewish, there are very few recipes in this book, which include pork. In the index, I count only two, while I count 29 references to lamb, some with occurrences on many different pages.

Then, I got to the chapter on eggs, and I began finding a few genuinely distinctive dishes. Here, I found a style of omelet which is genuinely different from French or Italian models. It is a sautéed egg mixture done in such a fashion that you can easily make several servings in a single pan, in very much the same way as you may make pancakes or English muffins on a griddle. The novelty of this dish is doubly interesting as it makes use of a really unusual ingredient, the liquid squeezed from the pulp in the middle of a zucchini. Most of the other egg dishes are pretty standard combinations of European style scrambled eggs with Middle Eastern ingredients. Be prepared to bone up on your egg technique before trying these recipes, as there is no good instruction on how to achieve light, uncolored cooked eggs.

The real star of Lebanese cuisine appears to be `kibbe' Anglicized from `Kibbeh', which may easily be to Lebanon what pasta is to Italy and cous cous is to Morocco. Like both of these dishes, it is characterized by an extreme simplicity of ingredients, using only bulgar, chopped onion, and lamb, combined in a great variety of ways, with a great variety of sauces and accouterments. An entire chapter is devoted to the subject, but Kibbe dishes pop up in other chapters, just as pasta shows up in soup, salad, and appetizer recipes. Kibbe is baked, sautéed, and braised in balls, cylinders, and circles the size of piecrusts.

After Kibbe, we are back in familiar territory with a chapter on Kafta, the proper Lebanese name for shish kebabs. Next are stuffed vegetables, which seems to be at least as important to Lebanese cuisine as it is to both Italy and my central European ancestors from the banks of the Danube.

The book also covers the classic breads of Lebanon such as pita, although advance knowledge of bread baking and yeast may be needed to work through the recipes.

Other than a family interest in Lebanese tradition, the primary reason to check out this book would be for the rich source of healthy recipes including bulgar wheat, yogurt, nuts, lean meat, and fruits and vegetables. The writing and editing is not that of a scholar. There are many word usages which are simply the result of the author's less than perfect grasp of English and there is disorganization's in parts of the book which detract from a careful study of the volume.

But, this is still a very worthwhile coverage of a truly interesting and rewarding cuisine.

Having lived in Lebanon and gotten cooking tips from many great "home cooks" I was delighted to find this book. The recipes and their introductions are so true to the character of real cuisine that I recommend this book to whomever asks me about Middle East cooking. Anyone who can make a M'lookhiyeh taste good enough to want seconds is tops! It is helpful to known something about the cuisine to fully appreciate the wisdom in Ms. Helou's advice.

I have been living in the Middle East for the past 10 years,I am married to a Lebanese and have an extensive collection of Middle Eastern cookbooks so I think I have some understanding about the cuisine. In my opinion, this cookbook does not measure up to many of the other cookbooks in my collection. I agree with the other reviewer who posted that this cookbook has some problems with some of it's recipes. If you are looking to understand the history behind the food and some uncommon recipes purchase "Recipes and Remembrances from an Eastern Mediterranean Kitchen: A Culinary Journey through Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan," by Sonia Uvezian. This is a great resource. If you want easy straight forward recipes purchase "Classic Lebanese Cuisine" by Kamal Al-Faqih. (If you order the book directly from his site you get a free DVD showing how to prepare many popular Lebanese dishes). I also recommend "From the Land of Figs and Olives" for a general Middle Eastern and North African cookbook.

I grew up in a Lebanese household where my mom cooked for the family all the time. The recipes that I tried form this book tasted just as I remember my mom's home cooking. The stuffed grape leaves recipe tasted like the way my grandmother used to make them in the mountain village of Khenchara, Lebanon. I could almost smell the mountain of Lebanon right here in Kansas, USA.

One recipe didn't work for me and that was "Kaak el-eed" or "Easter Galettes" -- the reason might be that I didn't follow the recipe exactly by not letting the semolina and milk mixture soak for an hour and a half as directed which made the dough too sticky to handle. I fixed the problem by adding flour and it worked out, and they came out good.

My wife who lived all of her life in Kansas loves this type of cooking and it is a treat for her and our kids every time I cook Lebanese cuisine. My wife was not too fond of stuffed grape leaves until I cooked it using this book's recipe. She got hooked. I have altered a few recipes here and there but kept the main ingredients and procedures very much the same. I have two other Lebanese cooking books and I use them as a cross refernce, but this book is the one I end up using the most. The thing is that even though Lebanon is a very small country, one will find variations on the same recipe depending on the region of Lebanon.

The recipes are a little wordy, but that might be preferred by some people.

A little hint on the pocket bread "khibz": After rolling the dough into flat disks, let them rest for 20 minutes, covered. Meantime, place a cast iron skillet or griddle (Warning: DO NOT USE TEFLON coated-ware) on the second shelf in the oven. Turn broiler on and preheat skillet (about 10 minutes), then bake the bread disks with the broiler about 1 minute each and watch them puff up fully. It is important not to bake them too long or they will dry up and harden or even burn. As you pull the bread from the oven, let cool down under a towel, then put 8 or 10 loafs in a Ziplock plastic bag and store in the refrigerator. Warm in the microwave for 5-10 seconds before use to soften.

It's a real shame. This cook book has the potential to be a great book but where are the pictures? How are you supposed to know what your dish is meant to look like.

This book had alot of recipes that I had been looking for. I needed the main engridents List, with my Mothers help we add some spice that the old country uses, and omitted the ones we did not need , I got What I wanted and then some.
Thank You

We have enjoyed several of these recipes already. Easy to follow and quite delicious.

I can't wait to try all of these recipes - I have finally found a book that has all the wonderful lebonese food my grandmother makes...need I say more? :)