Product Description

With The Essential Mediterranean, Nancy Harmon Jenkins continues her lifelong exploration of Mediterranean food -- how it is grown, prepared, and shared around the table. In her latest book, Ms. Jenkins introduces cooks and readers to a cluster of core ingredients and foodways that are fundamental to all of the Mediterranean's diverse cuisines. She shows how the Mediterranean attitude toward food -- a combination of respect, integrity, enthusiasm, and sheer joy -- can be cultivated across the Atlantic.

In twelve informative and captivating chapters, the author focuses on the core ingredients common to the diverse cuisines of the region: salt, wine and vinegar, pasta and couscous, bread, olive oil, Old World legumes, New World peppers and tomatoes, dairy products, the family pig, and the resources of the sea. In each chapter she travels to a different corner of the Inner Sea to describe how and why these essential ingredients are obtained, what determines their quality, and where they fit in local cuisines.

Each chapter draws on history and ethnography as much as on the lives of Mediterranean people today. Readers will delight in Majid Mahjoub, the colorful Tunisian "Shakespeare of olive oil," and commiserate with Provencal cheese maker Yves van Weddingen as he struggles to maintain his standards in the face of bureaucratic demands. Home cooks will garner a new appreciation of high-quality Spanish jamon de bellota as they follow the Trigo family through the annual winter ritual of transforming the family pig into hams and sausages.

More than 170 contemporary, accessible recipes, simple to reproduce at home, bring the foods and the regions alive, while additional chapters include basic procedures and staples, as well as a helpful guide to ingredient sources.

The Essential Mediterranean gets to the heart of this world, celebrating its diverse food cultures and the shared ingredients that are the essence of these remarkable cuisines.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #169598 in Books
• Published on: 2003-03-01
• Released on: 2003-03-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 1.50" h x 7.60" w x 9.60" l, 2.34 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 448 pages

Amazon.com Review
The table of contents of The Essential Mediterranean is the first hint that author Nancy Harmon Jenkins is about to reveal to the reader a Mediterranean most never see or know. "Salt." That's the first chapter, followed by "Olives and Olive Oil," "Wheat," "Pasta and Couscous," "Wine," "The Oldest Legumes," "Peppers and Tomatoes," "The Family Pig," "The Sea," and "From the Pasture." This is a reader's book. Jenkins writes her way into the heart of the region, its history, its food, its people with a level of prose and insight rarely encountered in food writing. But she's also a wonderful cook. So these chapters are followed by two appendices that explain basic technique and food sources, because The Essential Mediterranean is also a cook's book.

"Food," Jenkins writes, "is present in Mediterranean cultures in a way it's not in our own ... the way it's grown and harvested, the way it's prepared, what's in season and out...." The Essential Mediterranean brings that same sensibility, or at least its potential, into the North American kitchen and home. These are fabulous flavors, she reminds the reader, simple foods, with health benefits suited to life in a spa. And, they are easy to include in our daily fare. It's a matter of understanding the key ingredients, as though they are building blocks. "A recipe," Jenkins notes, "is a formula.... Cooking, on the other hand, is a strategy...." This is a book to read, and then to taste, with dozens of classic, delicious recipes. By the time you finish The Essential Mediterranean, you will not only be a better Mediterranean cook, you will know why. --Schuyler Ingle

From Publishers Weekly
Books on Mediterranean food are common, but this one is uncommonly good. Jenkins's writing experience stands her in good stead in this innovative exploration of this sunny region. Chapters are organized by major ingredient, and each opens with a thoughtful essay on the item that blends personal experience and well-researched information. The first chapter, on salt, explains the salinity of the Mediterranean and recounts a tour of a saltworks in Sicily with its owner, a gentleman over 80 years old who credits the magnesium in the salt for his good health. While almost every recipe in the world calls for salt, Jenkins does a good job featuring those in which salt or salt-preserved ingredients are key: Salt-Baked Fish and Moroccan Chicken with Black Olives and Salted Lemons. Another chapter on olives and olive oil features Turkish Green Beans and Olive Oil and a Tunisian Orange-Olive Oil Tea Cake that calls for pulverized whole oranges, skin and all. A chapter on wheat contains a recipe for Classic Mediterranean-Style Bread Made with a Sponge that cleverly transforms the dough into everything from focaccia to a North African bread with fennel and nigella seeds. Jenkins enables those of us not lucky enough to reside along the Mediterranean with the tools for an authentic re-creation; e.g., Focaccia di Recco from Liguria calls for a combination of taleggio, goats' milk cheese and sour cream to reproduce the flavor of a local cheese not available outside the area. She also plucks deserving dishes such as Green Tomato Jam Pie and Balkan Oven-Baked Meat and Vegetable Stew from obscurity, proving that no matter how many books have been written about the Mediterranean, a talented cook can still find more recipes to harvest.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Nancy Harmon Jenkins takes a deconstructionist approach to Mediterranean foods, showing how the same ingredients are used from country to country to create unique and wholly different dishes. This novel approach turns The Essential Mediterranean from just another cookbook into a thought-provoking disquisition on the international history and development of food and cooking. She shows how pizza differs from one part of Italy to another and how it appears in different guises around the Mediterranean rim, from Arab versions topped with spiced lamb to a Spanish example called cocas, topped with sweet peppers and nuts. The pig, even where it's considered forbidden food, has a major food role, and it turns up in hams and sausages throughout the region. Olives and their oil thrive everywhere in the Mediterranean, and Jenkins has a host of recipes from potatoes fried in olive oil to Tunisian green olives stuffed with garlic- and caraway-spiced ground veal. This is an important contribution to cultural anthropology as well as to cooking. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Deep Analysis and History of Mediterranean Cuisine
Nancy Harmon Jenkins clearly belongs to the elite cadre of culinary writers who interpret Mediterranean cuisine for us. Foremost among these are Elizabeth David, Claudia Roden, Paula Wolfert, and Clifford Wright. And that doesn't include the many writers specializing in particular countries, such as Penelope Casas on Spain, Diane Kochilas on Greece, and Patricia Wells on France.

Each of these writers gives us a slightly different perspective on the same subject, so they rarely overlap in their general essays on the Mediterranean. Roden is the historian, Wolfert is the ethnologist, and Wright is the taxonomist. Jenkins' role seems to be the dietitian and synthesist, explaining what it is that makes Mediterranean cuisine distinctive and, in other works, what makes it as healthy as it appears in demographic studies of peoples and diets.

Of all the works I have read by these authors, this book is the most interesting to people interested in history and current events, but with only an average interest in cooking. The primary object of the book is to identify those foodstuffs that are central to the Mediterranean diet, and how they achieved that status. The main characters in this story are salt, olives, wheat and its products, wine and vinegar, legumes, peppers (chiles), tomatoes, pork, seafood, and milk (giving cheese and yogurt).

The first item, salt, may seem unexciting since every culture has used and valued salt. But, salt has played a larger role in Mediterranean history than in other cultures because the Mediterranean Sea happens to be a lot saltier than the broader `seven seas'. This means that it is a lot easier to harvest sea salt, which means that salt preserved foods become much more common. A perfect example of how simple things can make enormous differences.

Olives and olive oil are a no-brainer and anyone who has read at any length on Mediterranean food will not find a lot of new information here. The chapter on wheat was a major surprise on at least two counts. The first was biological. I knew there was a significant difference between durum wheat and other wheats, but I had no idea the difference was at such a deep genetic level and that durum wheat represents less than 10% of world wheat crops. The second surprise was historical. I am well aware of the difference between soft and hard pastas from the north and south of Italy respectively, but I had no idea that hard pasta (macaroni) was almost entirely limited in its production and distribution to southern Italy until after the end of World War II. This makes it clear that as important as bread is today as a Mediterranean starch, it once was much more important in Italy.

Almost every chapter had its little surprises. While I was skimming my way through the chapter on Old World beans, I was surprised by the discovery that there is a significant genetically based allergy to fava beans and that none other than Pythagoras banned their consumption. This may only be exciting to an avid reader of history and philosophy, but it certainly puts a new twist on how I think about fava beans the next time Mario Batali breaks them out on `Molto Mario'.

The list goes on. This book clearly fills a void in food writing by clearly defining a subject people often talk about without being really clear about their subject. As a result of the nutritional findings cited earlier, it becomes pretty important to know what it is that makes all those southern Italians so healthy.

One concern is that most of the book deals with Italy, southern France, and Spain. The author even concedes this point at the beginning, with the totally understandable statement that she is dealing with what she knows. On the other side of the coin, the range of the author's sources is very broad, including source material from many historical documents on peasant life in the Mediterranean in the last thousand years.

In addition to the essays on foodstuffs, the book offers recipes featuring each item. All are worthy, but the real value to the book is in the essays. That being said, I was really disappointed to find that although the book had a very good bibliography, there were references to authorities' names with no mention of them in the bibliography. The chapter on legumes for example refers to the anthropologist Sidney Mintz, yet no work by Mr. (Dr.?) Mintz appears in the bibliography. Not good reflections on Harper Collins' copy editors.

This is a small annoyance. Overall, the book gives a fresh, insightful view of Mediterranean cuisine. Almost all the recipes are classics, with relatively simple, straightforward instructions. Maybe not as authentic as Paula Wolfert, but definitely more authentic than Good Housekeeping.

Highly recommended for any foodie or even for History buffs.

What a beautiful book!
To call this book a "cookbook" is really an understatment- it's an indulgence in the ways of the Mediterranean lifestyle. The delicious recipes are an added bonus. Learn all about the best olive oil to buy, how it's processed, and read Jenkins' interview with an expert on the subject. This is also one of the most beautiful cookbooks I've owned. If you love Mediterranean food and want to know more about the tradtions and history behind it, this is the best book! Makes an impressive gift.

I only care about the recipes, and these are good.
I have a book on Moroccan cooking by Paula Wolfert and a book on Syrian cooking, and both are daunting to me because of the techniques and equipment required. I consider this book as a bridge into understanding how to cook Mediterranean food. It has the best tabouleh recipe of all time. I look forward to using this as a primer and a reference. From this book I will gain the familiarity with the food in order to cook it well.