The Medieval Kitchen Recipes from France and Italy
June 30, 2009 by Italian Recipes · Leave a Comment
The Medieval Kitchen Recipes from France and Italy
An English-language edition of La Gastronomie au Moyen Age: 160 Recettes de France et d’Italie, published in Paris in 1993, this volume of medieval recipes adapted for the modern cook is both usable and informative. Redon (Univ. of Paris), Fran?ois Sabban (L’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris), and Silvano Serventi, an independent researcher, have combined their knowledge of languages, food, and history to create this fascinating collection of 153 recipes, ranging from soups and pasta to meats, sauces, and desserts. Each recipe is presented in its original form, in translation, and adapted for modern cooks. A brief passage also explains the significance of the recipe and its relation to other dishes. Although it is not the only title covering medieval cookery (see, e.g., Madeleine Cosman’s Fabulous Feasts: Medieval Cookery and Ceremony, LJ 1/15/77), this well-organized and entertaining work is recommended for specialized food or medieval collections in large public and academic libraries.AMary Martin, CAPCON Lib. Network, Washington, DC
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars Timeless recipes
This is a well researched and written cookbook. It gives the history of what items were available at the particular time in the Middle Ages and how they were used in various recipes. Other historical culinary tidbits are included and are quite interesting and informative.
The dishes made from these recipes are quite delicious and make it worth hunting out some of the more difficult to find ingredients. Where possible, alternative ingredients are suggested. It is especially enjoyable - when your guests exclaim their pleasure over a tasty dish - to inform them of the antiquity of the recipe.
This book makes an excellent gift for those cooks who especially enjoy history. I highly recommend The Medieval Kitchen to anyone with an adventuresome culinary spirit.
4 Stars Delightful but incomplete
This book is as good as all the other reviewers say, but didn’t they eat breakfast in the Middle Ages? The book should be retitled - Medieval Dinners.
5 Stars An excellent resource
My mother gave me The Medi
Luxury Real Estate Marketing Essentials: The Luxury of Consistency
June 30, 2009 by Italian Recipes · Leave a Comment
Lidias Family Table Ribs Italian Style
June 30, 2009 by Italian Recipes · Leave a Comment
Lidias Family Table Ribs Italian Style
Everyone loves ribs. Lidia is joined today by one of her chefs from Kansas City where ribs are a favorite. She prepares two great pork rib dishes –one “Italian style” and the other with pork rib guazzetto served with rigatoni. A nice vegetable dish as a side is her skillet cauliflower.
The Best of Gourmet Sixty five Years Sixty five Favorite Recipes
June 29, 2009 by Italian Recipes · Leave a Comment
The Best of Gourmet Sixty five Years Sixty five Favorite Recipes
Grilling has come a long way in America over the past decade, and now Gourmet shows you how to fire up your grill in style with a Sizzle in the City dinner that applauds Latin flavors. Yuca chips, avocado jicama salsa, and pink daiquiris are a colorful beginning, then it’s on to grilled matambre (spinach-and-carrot-stuffed flank steak). Coconut tuile cones with passion-fruit ice cream add a final touch of chic to a very fashionable party. This is just one of the dozens of remarkable menus you’ll find in this volume of The Best of Gourmet.
And speaking of sophistication, this year’s Cuisines of the World section turns to San Francisco, a city that blends global cuisines for a taste all its own. Here you’ll find a celebration feast inspired by the vibrant Italian community of North Beach, a glamorous Food Noir dinner, a handful of local favorites like crab Louis and Hangtown fry (fried-oyster omelet), and several dishes featuring the irresistible artichoke.
Indoors or out–let The Best of Gourmet, Featuring the Flavors of San Francisco make a stylish difference in your entertaining.
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars Fabulous Gourmet
The Best of Gourmet 2007 is a collection of popular recipes featured in Gourmet Magazine. It is also a must-have for anyone who wishes to produce a meal or dessert that is out of the ordinary. If you want to dazzle your guests or surprise the green-bean casserole lot at the next potluck, use one of the recipes in this book.
I was recently asked to prepare some desserts for a Christmas-themed cocktail party. Besides a fruit tarte, cheesecake, and small assortment of pastries, the hostess asked if I would make a red velvet cake. I wanted to do something different, something unexpected, because a red velvet cake is really just a chocolate cake with a lot of food coloring.
Anyway, I used a white chocolate cream cheese frosting and decorated the cake with a recipe I found in The Best of Gourmet. The recipe calls for rice noodles, soaked in water, dried, deep fried, and sprinkled with sugar. In the book, these resemble great white coral leaves and are placed on top of a mound of mango sorbet. I did a little twist. I shaped the noodles to resemble snowflakes, then sprinkled them with sparkling/silver sugar. I had these sticking out of the top and sides of the cake and it looked amazing. It was easy, spectacular, and completely unexpected.
The recipes can be complicated but are well worth the effort.
The unique recipes, fabulous layout, and clever “menu” concept make this a book that is easy for me to recommend.
5 Stars Another tummy tome from ‘Gourment’ Great Entertaining’
`The Best of Gourmet 2007′ is a 65th Anniversary edition of recipes collected from `Gourmet’ of both the last year and from the previous 65 (up to 2005) years. In most ways, it is very similar to `The Best of Gourmet 2006′, which means it’s an excellent source of menus for entertaining 6 to 8 people at dinner on a regular basis, when you have an aversion to repeating yourself too often.
The book begins with the collection of 65 `favorite’ recipes. This collection is not uniformly easy, difficult, or popular. Some, like their versions of cabbage and noodles and Caesar salad, are simple and common while the chocolate souffle cake and the Vietnamese Pho Bo (Hanoi Beef Noodle soup) are complex and exotic. This makes the section good foodie reading, to see what it is which tickles the fancy of the `Gourmet’ editors.
As with all `Gourmet’ recipes, at least all I’ve seen over the past four years that I’ve been reading the magazine, the instructions are detailed and quite precise; however, being true to the magazine’s name, they have something about them which makes them more interesting than the average `Joy of Cooking’ or even `Good Housekeeping’ recipe. The very best thing about the selection of `Gourmet’ recipes for me is that they carry lots of recipes for classic types of dishes which are simply a bit beyond the pale of the ‘30 Minute Meal’ crowd. This includes recipes for gratins, tarts, breads, crackers(!), souffles, braises, cakes, pies, and assembled desserts such as a charlotte. The excellent index does, however, provide nifty little clock icons by each recipe that can be done in that famous ‘30 minutes’ or less. This being `Gourmet’, I may take this with a grain of salt, and stick with Rachael Ray if you are seriously interested in FAST dishes.
After the ‘65 Favorite Recipes’ comes 18 menus, with each recipe within a menu calibrated to produce the same number of servings, something not everyone with the same objective can seem to pull off. There is no obvious pattern to the choice or arrangement of menus. The overriding criterion was, I’m sure, did it appear in `Gourmet’ in the previous 12 months (in 2006, actually). Some are oriented to a location (New Mexico, Naples, Greek Seaside, Provence), some are keyed to a season (summer, winter, fall harvest), some are for a specific meal (breakfast, lunch, supper), and some are for a particular holiday (Lunar New Year, Thanksgiving (2), Christmas cocktail party, Christmas feast). The shotgun selection is less random if you happen to own several of the previous yearly `Gourmet’ collections. Put them all together and you have a really fine collection of hundreds of different menus, all with the `Gourmet’ imprimatur. This is by far the best auxiliary I know of to a copy of Martha Stewart’s classic `Entertaining’. It’s even better than anything I’ve seen from Martha and company. Each menu, even those for breakfast, include one or more wine selections for the menu, and they are very specific, down to the chateau and vintage year! About half of these recipes are showcased in quarter, half, or full-page pics. Unfortunately, the good editors are often not able to put the recipe and pic on the same or facing pages. Pity.
Following the 18 menus, with approximately 100 recipes, is `The Recipe Compendium’, with a dozen or more recipes in each of the following categories:
Appetizers
Breads
Soups
Fish and Shellfish
Meats
Poultry
Breakfast, Brunch, and Sandwiches
Pasta and Grains
Vegetables
Salads
Condiments and sauces
Desserts
These recipes are not accompanied by photographs. Unlike the menu recipes, they are almost uniformly calibrated to `Serve 4′. This is nice, as it makes it a lot easier to match up recipes to create a menu of your own. All recipes also contain two timings, one is `active’ time and the other is `start to finish’.
Where appropriate, each recipe also cites special equipment and references to a `Sources’ glossary where the ingredient or equipment is not available at the typical supermarket. I found two quirks in these features. One was the fact that sometimes there were references to `Sources’, but the item was nowhere to be found in this glossary. The other was the reference to an `adjustable-blade slicer’. Now in a moment of cognitive befuddlement, I could not for the life of me imagine what that was, until I realized they were talking about a mandoline! This is a case like those in cookbooks translated from the French where `Herbes de Provence’ is translated to `French herb collection’. The fact is that anyone who owns three cookbooks and watches the Food Network at least 2 hours a week will know what `mandoline’ and `herbes de Provence’ mean, and will be befuddled by a `translation’. But so much for that little linguistic rant.
At a list price of $40, these books are just a bit pricy, but there is a great synergy to be had in owning several in the series. If you are really interesting in cooking and have little interest in travel or expensive restaurants, the cost of these books is a far better investment than the cost of 12 issues of `Gourmet’. One can hope that Conde Nast will come out with an index to all these volumes (It may exist, I haven’t looked for it yet).
Great resource for entertaining.
Lidias Family Table While the Oven is On
June 28, 2009 by Italian Recipes · Leave a Comment
Lidias Family Table While the Oven is On
Everyone loves a buffet! Lidia demonstrates a great way to put together an Italian antipasti buffet with cured meats and Italian cheeses and some wonderful Italian preparations– Roasted Eggplant and Tomato Salad, Roasted Pack Olives and Pearl Onions and Mushroom Custard.
