Product Description

The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean refers both Paula Wolfert's love of great food and the pioneering spirit that has inspired her to travel across the globe many times over in search of the world's best recipes. In all of her remarkable books, she delves with tireless enthusiasm into her research and writing, ensuring each recipe's authenticity and accessibility. In The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean, she brings readers and cooks into the kitchens that produce the healthy home cooking that is the trademark of such lands as Macedonian, Turkey, Syria, and the countries on the Black Sea.

Wolfert's food dazzles the palate. Her book begins with recipes for sauces and dips, including two walnut and pomegranate sauces; soups include Anatolian Sour Soup and Macedonian "Green Cream." Meat, poultry, and fish dishes include eleven varities of kibbeh, Duck with Quinces, and Skewered Swordfish. Her sumptuous recipes for vegetables and grains--stuffed eggplants, pilafs, and pomegranate-flavored vegetables, to name a few--reflect the bounty and healthful eating patterns of the Eastern Mediterranean.

Wolfert's Middle Eastern grain salads are healthy and rich with flavor. Paula travels into the kitchens of native cooks to ensure that her recipes are as genuine as they are delicious. She takes us into the home of a friend in the Republic of Georgia, whose mother teaches Wolfert how to prepare Chicken Tabaka; to a mountain village in northern Greece where, with a sister food writer, she searches for fine cheese to complete a savory pie; and to a farm in Turkey, where the country's best bread baker tells her secrets of baking unleavened flat griddle bread.

These delicious, authentic recipes focus on the healthy eating patterns for which the Eastern Mediterranean is increasingly being recognized. Wolfert's recipes are as delightful to read as they are to use. Armchair cooks and travelers will be moved by the descriptive geography and resonate personal stories Paula Wolfert relates along with her fabulous dishes. Wolfert's expertise is renowned among food lovers, amateur and professional, and her joy of discovering new ways to prepare food is infectious to her many devoted readers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36830 in Books
• Published on: 1994-06-01
• Released on: 1994-05-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 448 pages

Amazon.com Review
Paula Wolfert is one of the first food writers to acknowledge the importance of Mediterranean cuisine. During a five-year journey that encompassed parts of the Balkans, Turkey, Syria and Greece, she collected a myriad of recipes from native cooks that are easily adaptable to American kitchens. The diet of the region depends upon grains, legumes, vegetables and nuts--perfect for the health conscious--and lends itself to recipes such as pumpkin kibbeh stuffed with spinach, chick peas and walnuts and nettle cheese pie. Wolfert is careful to provide special advice to ensure smooth preparation. The book won both the 1995 Julia Child Cookbook Award in the International Category, and the 1995 James Beard Award in the International Category.

From Publishers Weekly
Food fads may come and go, but meanwhile Wolfert ( Couscous and Other Good Food From Morocco ) runs off to some little-documented area of the world and puts it on the (American) culinary map. One of the first food writers to recognize the importance of Mediterranean cuisines, she turns now to the Eastern Mediterranean. Encompassing portions of the Balkans, Turkey, Syria and Greece, the diet of the region depends on grains, legumes, vegetables and nuts, while avoiding meat or using it in small portions. True, this style of cooking is ideal for Americans obsessed with the Food Pyramid dietary guidelines, but Wolfert does not belabor the point. Not only does she offer wholesome recipes easily adaptable to American homes, but she also includes some of the more unusual preparations. A Macedonian nettle and cheese pie is so delicious, she claims, that Wolfert began growing the prickly greens herself. The traditional meaty kibbeh, usually a lump of ground lamb, she reinterprets as a pumpkin kibbeh, stuffed with spinach, chick peas and walnuts. Voices from native cooks, visited over a span of five years, add color, humor and realism to the melting pots of Macedonia, Turkey, the Levant and the Republic of Georgia. Wolfert is careful to add acknowledgements and extra tidbits of advice to help preparations go smoothly. Moreover, the general tone of the book is cheerful and encouraging. No matter how stinging the nettles, one is tempted to grab them firmly, rub them with kosher salt to remove the stings and blanch them for a pie.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Wolfert is widely recognized as an authority on Mediterranean cuisines; her Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco (1973) is a classic, and her more recent Paula Wolfert's World of Food (LJ 10/15/88) offers a cook's tour of the region. Here, however, she focuses on four lesser-known areas: Macedonia and northern Greece, Turkey, the Republic of Georgia, and the countries of the Levant, particularly Syria. Wolfert spent five years traveling throughout these diverse regions to write this book, visiting dozens of home cooks in their kitchens and tracking down obscure recipes and culinary traditions. As always, the book is impressively researched and beautifully written. The recipes are intriguing and painstakingly detailed, among them Macedonian Nettle and Cheese Pie, Three Caucasian Soups, and Gaziantep-Style Chopped Salad. Several recent titles have touched upon some of these areas, but Wolfert's is unique. An essential purchase. [BOMC HomeStyle main selection.]
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Superior Access to an Increasingly Important Cuisine
This is the fourth Paula Wolfert book I have reviewed and I find it better than the first three, even better than her important first book on Moroccan cuisine. It easily lands on my short list of best cookbooks dedicated to a specific regional cuisine. While Elizabeth David's book on Mediterranean cuisine maintains an important place in the literature of Mediterranean cuisine and Claudia Roden's book on the food of the Middle East improves the depth of coverage over David, Wolfert's book tops both of them in depth of coverage and may rival David's book for insights into the culinary wellsprings of the region.

Outside of writing on the Mediterranean and the Middle East, I find Wolfert's book to rival those of Diana Kennedy on Mexico and even match the quality, if not the seminal influence of Julia Child's 'Mastering the Art of French Cooking'. The main edge I would give to Child's book is that it succeeds in bringing a more limited topic into a bit clearer focus.

Wolfert does not cover the entire Eastern Mediterranean, and her book gains from the focus she put on the four areas she covers. These are:

Northern Greece (Macedonia and Thrace)
Turkey (Anatolia)
Georgia (bordering on the Black Sea, south of the Caucasus)
The Levant (Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Israel)

While Georgia does not border on the Mediterranean, Wolfert finds that the cuisine here is very similar to the other three regions she has chosen, which makes sense since Georgia borders on Turkey and probably shares much of the same agriculture as northern Greece.

Wolfert shares with Kennedy a love of her subject, which matches or surpasses that of even native writers. Paula gives us practically every aspect of her search of local, authentic recipes from stories about her local contacts through thoughts about how to adapt authentic recipes to American kitchens to reflections on those features which distinguish great cuisines, as she does when discussing pilafs, where she says "For me, any cuisine that makes plain starches so beguiling is a cuisine of great sophistication." The accuracy of this statement hits home immediately since I just got finished reviewing a book on Tuscan food which manages to make stale bread, dried beans, and corn mush into interesting food.

That this is a great book still requires some qualification to identify the audience for which it is best suited.

First, it is an essential volume in the library of cookbook collectors and food scholars. Like Kennedy and unlike David and Roden, Wolfert maintains the touch of the scholar in her writing in citing connections to local sources and native language documents. For the cookbook reader and collector, I also offer the opinion that Ms. Wolfert is an excellent writer, or, she has a really crackerjack crew of editors at Harper Collins to tighten up her prose.

Second, it is probably one of the very best cookbooks for natives of this region transplanted to the United States. There are books on the cuisine of Turkey and Greece, but I suspect books on the food of Georgia are pretty uncommon.

Third, it is a great book for non-natives who happen to have developed a taste for this food.

Fourth, this is a superior source of recipes for vegetarian dishes and for ways of substituting bulgar wheat for rice in various dishes. The book is also a great source of yogurt recipes, including directions on making it at home.

Fifth, the book takes special note of recipes, which are suitable as Meze dishes.

Sixth, the book gives more coverage to breakfast and lunch and to the food appropriate to Ramadan. When other authors gloss over this last subject, it is like they are ignoring the presence of the 800 pound gorilla in the room.

There may be people who will not get their money's worth out of this book. Like Wolfert's most recent book on slow cooking recipes, these recipes are all rather long and clearly benefit from long cooking times. If speed is your thing, go to Rachael Ray or a general cookbook author like Mark Bittman. Both have adapted dishes from Wolfert's canon.

For my money, this is easily one of the top ten (10) cookbooks available in English. It's geographic range is eclectic and it may not replace books specializing in Greek or Turkish or Lebanese cuisines, but it's approach to food writing is a great model for others.

great cookbook
This is one of my very favorite cookbooks. Though the recipes can often be very involved, they are so meticulously written and tested, it is difficult to fail with them. Additionally, as an anthropologist, Paula Wolfert puts the food into its cultural context, and she has done an excellent job of making the book readable and interesting. Because her recipes are always very true to the source, the techniques are often different from the instructions one might get from recipes written by restaurant chefs. These dishes come from homes and therefore can be cooked in homes. Everything I have ever cooked from this book has been not only interesting, but highly memorable. Her recipe for chicken stuffed with rice, lamb, and pine nuts is fantastic. This book is a must for serious home cooks.

Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean
I truly love this book. I am a mother with two small children, which leaves me with little time for elaborate meals, and I am certainly not a serious cook or very experienced cook, but I have found this book to be very useful. There are a number of recipes that I have used dozens of times, and several more that I use on special occasions when I have more time to cook. There are also many "speciality" recipes that I have not had a chance to try, but it does not limit my enjoyment of this book. I have enjoyed trying new ingredients and replicating some of the dishes I tried while living in the Eastern Mediterranean. I especially appreciated the Georgian recipes since I did not know much about Georgia- and now we have the Georgian cheese bread pie often since my two-year-old loves it. I highly recommend this book!