![Nopalito: A Mexican Kitchen [A Cookbook]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/A1-n3R0qbHL._AC_UL160_SR160,160_.jpg)
Positive:
A vast collection of recipes from practically every country with a Muslim population, providing single-stop shopping for the reader.
Negative:
The recipes appear to have been put together by a large team of assistants (not a crime by itself), but there’s been relatively modest editorial oversight and integration, besides the spelling and grammar check that a sub-editor no doubt performed. Details follow.
1. Mysterious unexplained ingredients: Two ingredients, pul biber and mahlep are each mentioned in recipes, without a word of explanation, and no entry in either the index or the glossary of food ingredients. A Google search revealed the former to be Aleppo pepper (for which a medium-hot paprika or Kashmiri chili pepper can substitute), the latter the kernel of a type of cherry, which Wikipedia records as having a cherry+ bitter almond flavor.
2. Many recipes are very modest variants of each other, notably the breads, but this is rarely noted: the recipes within a section seem to be arranged in a random order without categorization. For example, Middle-eastern Saj bread (pg. 6) and Indian Flatbread (Chappati, pg. 30) are virtual clones of each other, though from widely separated locales – unleavened flatbreads made with only flour, salt and water - the only difference is that Chappati contains a very small amount of oil (plus that used to oil the griddle), while the Saj recipe avoids the oil by using a non-stick pan (which I suspect isn't traditional :-) ). In fact, you can omit oil in the chappati recipe if you have a charcoal or gas flame to directly cook the bread, this is a flatbread variant called phulka.
I would have expected the recipes within a section to be organized by technique: e.g., for breads, one might have unleavened breads, leavened baked breads, fried breads, stuffed breads and so on. By contrast, authors like Mark Bittman and Elisabeth Rozin are continually looking for, and pointing out, the similarities between recipes from diverse cuisines. (Rozin’s book “The Universal Kitchen” was devoted to this theme.)
3. I was looking forward to offal recipes, which are completely absent. The majority of Muslims in India, where I come from, live in poverty or are lower-middle-class, and make do with ingredients that “refined” palates might reject, making them delicious through the clever use of spices, as well as extending meat by combining with legumes (as in the Haleem recipe, pg. 264). They also economize on expensive fuel (as well as save significant time) by using a pressure cooker, whose mention in this book is conspicuous by its total absence. (Step 2 of the Haleem recipe, simmering the meat, legumes and wheat berries, takes 2 hours total, which a pressure cooker would reduce easily to a third or less of that time.)
4. Some recipes, if followed exactly, will most probably make you sick. The recipe for the Indonesian gado-gado pg. 385 (a variety of raw or lightly cooked vegetables plus other ingredients, served with a peanut-based dipping sauce) calls for using fermented shrimp paste (trassi) - an essential component of the sauce – without cooking. Trassi – overpowering by itself but delicious as a condiment – is bacteria-laden (anerobic bacteria perform the fermentation) and any recipe where it’s used must be cooked at least to boiling point. (I seriously doubt that the Indonesian Trassi exporters are using gamma irradiation to sterilize it.)
By contrast, when recipes in books such as “the cooking of Singapore”, by Chris Yeo and Joyce Jue, employ belachan (the Malaysian equivalent of trassi), they will not only tell you to dry-roast it first to get rid of most of the smell, but will employ it as part of a spice paste (rempah) that is cooked until the oil in the paste rises to the top.
5. The Index is not very useful, mostly omitting the (often well-known) ethnic names of recipes, except when the recipe is middle-eastern. Thus, you’ll find entries for Baklava, Fattoush, Tabbouleh, but gado-gado is missing – you’ll find under “egg and vegetable salad” even though a recipe that serves four includes two hard-boiled eggs each sliced in half. It wouldn’t have hurt to index the recipe under the ethnic name AND the western equivalent.
As an example of conscientious indexing, I would cite Mark Bittman’s “The World’s Best Recipes”, which categorizes recipes in multiple ways: by major ingredient, by category (snack, appetizer, main course, dessert, beverage) and by region of origin.
6. Some parts of the book simply reflect laziness. The entry for ras-al-hanout, a North African spice mixture, spends a third of a page just to eventually tell you that you should buy a brand that you like, By contrast, Paula Wolfert’s classic “The Food of Morocco” actually provides an example recipe, noting that you are free to innovate and modify it, since there are possibly as many variants for this recipe as there are spice-vendors in Morocco.
7. Some recipes call for unnecessary steps: somebody wasn’t thinking when transcribing the recipe. Step 1 of a recipe for lamb shanks with yoghurt sauce (pg, 179) calls for simmering the shanks in 5 cups of water, periodically skimming the froth off the surface. Skimming is a standard technique for making clear soups, but later, only ¼ cup of the broth is added to the spiced yoghurt. The rest is presumably either poured down the sink (if you have wastefulness in your DNA) or saved for another use. In the latter case, unless you are using the broth for a clear soup, the broth’s clarity is immaterial.
(In fact, the most common use of broth would be as an ingredient in other recipes, such as to cook food-grains such as rice. One of the great Paul Prudhomme’s cookbooks – I think it was “Fiery foods that I love” emphasized the use of stocks/broths for flavor, proclaiming “Water is only for washing!”)
In summary, the book needed much more editorial input from Ms. Helou. I hope these defects will be remedied in a future edition. Pretty photographs and scads of recipes do not suffice to make a great cookbook: Bittman's "The World's Best Recipes" lacks a single color photo, but is far better organized and, to me at least, ultimately more useful.
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Customer reviews
While looking for a new cookbook, the photos in Feast initially stood out as exceptionally pretty and the sheer volume and variety of recipes also impressed me. After receiving the book my family and I decided to make the kebabs and yogurt dish. The boys (only 2.5 + 5 yrs) loved helping mix the ingredients for the yogurt and carefully piercing the tomatoes onto skewers. Both dishes came out incredibly well and we can’t wait to try more recipes!!
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Reviewed in the United States on October 1, 2018
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Reviewed in the United States on June 25, 2018
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While looking for a new cookbook, the photos in Feast initially stood out as exceptionally pretty and the sheer volume and variety of recipes also impressed me. After receiving the book my family and I decided to make the kebabs and yogurt dish. The boys (only 2.5 + 5 yrs) loved helping mix the ingredients for the yogurt and carefully piercing the tomatoes onto skewers. Both dishes came out incredibly well and we can’t wait to try more recipes!!
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Reviewed in the United States on September 3, 2018
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Reviewed in the United States on June 11, 2018
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K A Byrne
Worth Every Penny
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The ultimate guide to the food of Islamic world
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Comprehensive book
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 15, 2018Verified Purchase
David B
Beautiful in all ways. To look at, to read and to follow the recipes for the food they produce.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 18, 2019Verified Purchase
Jennifer WIlliams
A world of spices opens up this Aladdin cave of recipes
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 11, 2018Verified Purchase
