The Essential Mediterranean: How Regional Cooks Transform Key Ingredients into the World's Favorite Cuisines – 170+ Authentic Recipes, Traditional Techniques, and Culinary Wisdom

by Nancy Harmon Jenkins

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 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.

Genres: Cookbooks, Cooking

448 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2003

Reviews

[Vannessa Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m not much into heavy on the salt individual so I never really paid much attention to there being various types of salt and their various uses. The recipes are hardcore Mediterranean dishes I would like to try prepared by an experienced cook before attempting myself.

[Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has great recipes. I love Mediterranean food.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book. The section on Salt really showcases her immersion style of writing, her recipes are real good and her apparent love of the large geographical region is apparent. This is where the greatness of the book ends. Simply puts she focus in to wide an area and thusly does an injustice to the very region she obviously is in love with. Her resources are outdated and her section on where to get supplies is way outdated and in need of a serious overhaul.

It is only because the recipes are there and reasonably detailed that I gave it 3 stars. My suggestion: it is a cookbook and nothing more and it could easily have been a slimmer book.