Middle Eastern Books - Page 2

Recipes and Remembrances from an Eastern Mediterranean Kitchen: A Culinary Journey through Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan

Sonia Uvezian

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 22 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

The one eastern Mediterranean cookbook I wouldn't be without 5 out of 5 stars.
53 of 58 people found this review helpful.

I was thoroughly disgusted to read the baseless criticisms of this superb cookbook. It is precisely to obtain an accurate account of the cookery of this region along with first-rate recipes that one needs to own "Recipes and Remembrances." Although Claudia Roden's "A New Book of Middle Eastern Food" is better than Paula Wolfert's "The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean," when it comes to recipes and text neither can approach "Recipes and Remembrances" in quality. I have cooked extensively from many Middle Eastern cookbooks, including these three, and I can honestly say that Uvezian's book upholds the highest standards of eastern Mediterranean/Middle Eastern cooking and is in a class by itself.

Editorial Review:

This culinary milestone has been hailed as a masterpiece, a classic, and the first and last word on eastern Mediterranean cooking. A welcome blend of scholarship and entertaining reading, this revelatory work features a wide range of authentic, clearly written recipes, many personal reminiscences, impressive culinary history, valuable information on ingredients, meals, and traditions, stunning period illustrations, and much more.

The Language of Baklava

Diana Abu-Jaber

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Moving and Delicious 5 out of 5 stars.
10 of 10 people found this review helpful.

A lovely book, reminding me somewhat of my own childhood and my over-the-top overprotective father. The descriptions of her family's meals are incredible. I found myself rushing to make the recipes, looking forward to enjoying devouring them as I read, like I was sitting at the table with the author.

One of those books that you think, "Ok, it's late... I'll just read until the end of this chapter," then you don't put it down.

Well, if you're a foodie daughter of an immigrant like me, anyway.

Editorial Review:

Diana Abu-Jaber’s vibrant, humorous memoir weaves together stories of being raised by a food-obsessed Jordanian father with tales of Lake Ontario shish kabob cookouts and goat stew feasts under Bedouin tents in the desert. These sensuously evoked repasts, complete with recipes, in turn illuminate the two cultures of Diana's childhood–American and Jordanian–while helping to paint a loving and complex portrait of her impractical, displaced immigrant father who, like many an immigrant before him, cooked to remember the place he came from and to pass that connection on to his children. The Language of Baklava irresistably invites us to sit down at the table with Diana’s family, sharing unforgettable meals that turn out to be as much about “grace, difference, faith, love” as they are about food.

A Taste of Persia

Najmieh Batmanglij

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

The perfect introduction to Persian Cuisine... 5 out of 5 stars.
8 of 8 people found this review helpful.

As a Persian who's trying to learn to cook persian food, this is the best Persian cookbook I have. It lists the most popular foods, the receipes are easy to follow and turn out great! Almost as good as my own mom cooks them... I would definitley recommend this book!

Editorial Review:

A Taste of Persia is a collection of authentic recipes from one of the world s oldest cuisines, chosen and adapted for today's lifestyle and kitchen. Here are light appetizers and kababs, hearty stews and rich, golden-crusted rices, among many other dishes, all fragrant with the distinctive Persian use of herbs, spices and fruits. Each recipe offers clear, easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions. Most take less than an hour to prepare; many require only a few moments; many others can be made in advance. Besides its 100 recipes and 60 photographs, the book includes a useful dictionary of Persian cooking techniques and ingredients, and a brief history of Persian cookery. Together these make a complete introduction to this wonderful cuisine.

Kibbee 'N' Spice and Everything Nice : Popular and Easy Recipes for the Lebanese and American Family

Janet Kalush

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Excellent, Delicious, Nutritious...what more can I say? 4 out of 5 stars.
7 of 7 people found this review helpful.

This book is well laid out with a myriad of Lebanese dishes. The Author being Lebanese-American has adapted the recipes easily to the American Kitchen and Supermarket. Everything I have tried out of this cookbook has been delicious. I grew up eating this kind of food and the smells and flavors take me back. I would highly recommend this book for anyone that wishes to learn and more importantly eat Lebanese food. The copy I have has nutritional information with each recipe. The only reason it didn't get 5 stars is because I would have like more pictures and to have them with the recipes themselves. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

like sita used to make 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

this book is extremely simple to read and understand and very much like the country recipes from rural lebanon that my grandmother (sita) used to make.

A Great Cookbook! 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

I have really enjoyed owning this cookbook. My great-grandparents were from Lebanon so I've grown up eating Lebanese food but this was the first Lebanese cookbook that I've seen where the recipes are just like what I used to eat at Sittee's house on Sunday after church. Also, I want to add that the recipes are relatively easy and require ingredients that you can get at your local grocery store.

I HIGHLY recommend it!

Editorial Review:

A cookbook that celebrates the flavours and aromas of Lebanese cuisine: from hummus, tabouleh, baba ganoug, labanee, kibbee and more. Easy-to-follow recipes include explanations of ingredients and nutritional values.

Afghan Food & Cookery: Noshe Djan

Helen Saberi

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 23 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

This classic source for Afghan cookery is now available in an updated and expanded North American edition! Situated at the crossroads of four major regions -- the Middle East, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent and the Far East -- Afghanistan has survived centuries of invasions, whether military, cultural or culinary. Its hearty cuisine includes a tempting variety of offerings: lamb, pasta, chickpeas, rice pilafs, flat breads, kebabs, spinach, okra, lentils, yogurt, pastries and delicious teas, all flavored with delicate spices. This cookbook includes over 100 recipes, all adapted for the North American kitchen, for favorites like "Mantu (Pasta filled with Meat and Onion)", "Shinwari Kebab (Lamb Chops Kebab)", and "Qabili Pilau (Yellow Rice with Carrots and Raisins)". The author's informative introduction describes traditional Afghan holidays, festivals and celebrations; she also includes a section "The Afghan Kitchen", which provides essentials about cooking utensils, spices, ingredients and methods.

Lebanese Cuisine: More Than 250 Authentic Recipes From The Most Elegant Middle Eastern Cuisine

Anissa Helou

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Good Source for Authentic Recipes. Weak on cooking technique 4 out of 5 stars.
13 of 17 people found this review helpful.

`Lebanese Cuisine' By Lebanese / British culinary author Annisa Helau, author of the more recent and more widely popular `Mediterranean Street Food' is a good, if somewhat flawed presentation of an important cuisine of , in the author's emphasis, the `true' middle east.

For starters, this book is much better than some works on local cuisines of, say, Poland, Hungary, the Philippines, and Latvia which were written twenty to fifty years ago and may still be lurking on the shelves of your library in rebound, dusty editions with nothing more than one skimpily described recipe after another. One of the benefits of the renewed interest in traditional food is that the bar has been raised for writing about all ethnic cuisines, primarily by the very important works on Italian regional cuisine and works on African and Middle Eastern cooking by Paula Wolfert and Claudia Roden. And, while Ms. Helou obviously has an enormous amount of respect for Ms. Roden's important `The New Book of Middle Eastern Food', Ms. Helou takes issue with Ms. Roden on including Egypt, properly part of Africa rather than being in western Asia, the `true' middle east.

Ms. Annisa Helou begins her book with a brief but nice outline of Lebanese history. The land began as the home of the Biblical Canaanites, who became the great merchants and alphabet inventors, the Phoenicians. Since then, they have been the proverbial welcome mat over which walked the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks, and French. With all these landlords, the conclusion is that the Lebanese cuisine is one of the most interesting in the region. The cover, in fact, proclaims this as `250 recipes from the most elegant Middle Eastern cuisine'. I confess that it may be one of the most varied, but the degree to which hands are required as cooking and eating utensils tends to keep me from enlisting in this idea. And, while the author claims that the recent 25 year French protectorate of Lebanon laid the typically immense imprint of French cuisine on Lebanese cooking, I cannot easily see if from the recipes in this book. It seems to have much more in common with its Arab neighbors, including Egypt, than with the land of Escoffier.

On reading the first three chapters on `hors d'oeuvres', salads, and soups, I began to think there was simply nothing special going on here. So many things seemed like variations on Italian and Greek dishes such as the bread and tomato salads so reminiscent of panzanella. Things started picking up in the chapter on savory pastries. While any pop food commentator worth his salt will point out that stuffed dough dumplings are found the world around, the fact that we find them in an important niche of Lebanese cuisine is very interesting and a good source of recipes worthy of an earnest foodie conversation. In Lebanon, the roles of Ricotta and pork of Italy are taken by yogurt and lamb. While the author points out that until recently, the majority of the population of Lebanon has been Christian and not Arab or Jewish, there are very few recipes in this book, which include pork. In the index, I count only two, while I count 29 references to lamb, some with occurrences on many different pages.

Then, I got to the chapter on eggs, and I began finding a few genuinely distinctive dishes. Here, I found a style of omelet which is genuinely different from French or Italian models. It is a sautéed egg mixture done in such a fashion that you can easily make several servings in a single pan, in very much the same way as you may make pancakes or English muffins on a griddle. The novelty of this dish is doubly interesting as it makes use of a really unusual ingredient, the liquid squeezed from the pulp in the middle of a zucchini. Most of the other egg dishes are pretty standard combinations of European style scrambled eggs with Middle Eastern ingredients. Be prepared to bone up on your egg technique before trying these recipes, as there is no good instruction on how to achieve light, uncolored cooked eggs.

The real star of Lebanese cuisine appears to be `kibbe' Anglicized from `Kibbeh', which may easily be to Lebanon what pasta is to Italy and cous cous is to Morocco. Like both of these dishes, it is characterized by an extreme simplicity of ingredients, using only bulgar, chopped onion, and lamb, combined in a great variety of ways, with a great variety of sauces and accouterments. An entire chapter is devoted to the subject, but Kibbe dishes pop up in other chapters, just as pasta shows up in soup, salad, and appetizer recipes. Kibbe is baked, sautéed, and braised in balls, cylinders, and circles the size of piecrusts.

After Kibbe, we are back in familiar territory with a chapter on Kafta, the proper Lebanese name for shish kebabs. Next are stuffed vegetables, which seems to be at least as important to Lebanese cuisine as it is to both Italy and my central European ancestors from the banks of the Danube.

The book also covers the classic breads of Lebanon such as pita, although advance knowledge of bread baking and yeast may be needed to work through the recipes.

Other than a family interest in Lebanese tradition, the primary reason to check out this book would be for the rich source of healthy recipes including bulgar wheat, yogurt, nuts, lean meat, and fruits and vegetables. The writing and editing is not that of a scholar. There are many word usages which are simply the result of the author's less than perfect grasp of English and there is disorganization's in parts of the book which detract from a careful study of the volume.

But, this is still a very worthwhile coverage of a truly interesting and rewarding cuisine.

Editorial Review:

More than just a collection of recipes, Lebanese Cuisine offers a richly detailed portrait of the crown jewel of Middle Eastern cuisine. Short-listed for the prestigious Andre Simon award in England, it has garnered rave reviews from both sides of the Atlantic.

Artichoke to Za'atar: Modern Middle Eastern Food

Greg Malouf, Lucy Malouf

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

What life must have been like in Al Andalus 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

In an era in which we associate the Arab world with closed-mindedness and self-isolation a cookbook like this must come as a shock. These eclectic recipes remind one of the tales one often reads of banquets in the glory days of Al Andalus, where Jewish advisors counseled Syrian kings who ruled over a Christian population, and where the threads of so many different cultures intermingled freely to produce the greatest cultural flowering in the history of humanity.
That claim may seem a bit overblown, but just try the dried apricot and sherry cardamom ice cream, and you'll quickly realize that this is not a compendium of one's grandmother's old village recipes. This is a book that shows how cuisine is born in the mixing of the old and he new, the traditional and the foriegn. How refreshing to find a bood of middle-eastern cooking that isn't afraid to deploy pork or rabbit! Shukran!
Preserved lemon guacamole with smoked eel, salmon kibeh, watercress tabouleh, barbequed squid in a hot Yemeni relish, grilled haloumi endive salad, etc. etc. etc. What makes the recipes work is the way in which each extends the core idea of traditional recipe by borrowing from something outside of any traditional Arab cuisine. For example, by taking simple tabouleh and adapting it for watercress you come to realize just how parsley works in the original in a way that you never would by just making up a batch of the traditional fare.
In addition to the recipes the book features a number of descriptions of the place of various key ingredients in arab cuisines: their history, their raison d'etre, and their most commmon uses. Having a chapter on rosewater is really very helpful when you find yourself with a bottle of it and would like to put it so some use beyond scenting baklawa.
The one downside to the book is that it doesn't categorize recipes by type (e.g. desserts, appetizers, etc.). It's more a book meant for reading cover to cover than for picking out a dessert for tomorrows bridge party. Does anybody have those anymore?
Any serious cook is likely to count this among his or her top 5 cookbooks for a very long time. It really is that good. Now to try some of the turkish coffee ice-cream that has just finished churning.

Editorial Review:

This richly illustrated book offers a comprehensive collection of 170 recipes, organized alphabetically according to ingredients widely used in Middle Eastern cooking. Written by award-winning chef Greg Malouf and his writing partner, Lucy Malouf, Artichoke to Za'atar covers everything from the basics--almonds, lemons, and yogurt--to less widely known components such as pomegranates, rose water, and sumac. A brief description and history of each ingredient is provided, along with invaluable tips on how to select, prepare, and cook it. Originally published in 1999 as Arabesque, this book has earned international acclaim as the ultimate guide to modern Middle Eastern cuisine by a chef who is considered a master of the genre. Artichoke to Za'atar is a volume to read, use, and treasure--a must for anyone interested in creative cooking and culinary history. Now available in North America for the first time.

Afghan Cuisine: Cooking for Life : A Collection of Afghan Recipes (And Other Favorites) for the Novice Afghan and Non-Afghan Cook

Nafisa Sekandari

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

I definitely recommend this book! 5 out of 5 stars.
25 of 29 people found this review helpful.

I am married to an Afghan man and have had no prior experience to Afghan food before I had met him. Since then, he's tried to get me to learn to cook like his mother, however it's hard because I grew up on mac'n'cheese. But after a recent trip to Afghanistan, I felt that I should learn to cook because a) the food was delicious b) I respect his heritage and c) I don't want my kids to grow up on mac'n'cheese. This book made it really easy to follow and it included some non-afghan recipes which were a plus (I'm particularly fond of the macaroon squares!). Also, knowing that the proceeds give back to Afghanistan is important because having gone there, I know they need a lot of support to pick themselves up. It's great that this book helps to give back!

Delicious Afghan recipes in easy-to-follow steps 5 out of 5 stars.
22 of 23 people found this review helpful.

A real find for anyone who's wanted to duplicate distinctive Afghan dishes! Contains traditional food I've only eaten in restaurants--such as nan (Afghan bread), aushuk (like raviolis), and kudu bourani (pumpkin with yogurt). Also includes familiar non-Afghan selections--like hummus, chocolate baklava, and almond cake. Steps are easy to follow, even for novice cooks like me. And it's gratifying that the author plans to send a portion of the proceeds to help Afghani women and children.

The Complete Middle East Cookbook

Tess Mallos

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The cuisine of the Middle East has always had its devotees, and eating at Lebanese, Syrian, Turkish or Greek restaurants has delighted many people in recent years. But relatively few have tackled these dishes in their own kitchens. Now, with The Complete Middle East Cookbook, anyone can produce delectable meals from the exotic worlds of Homer, Omar Khayyam and the Arabian Nights. Author Tess Mallos provides carefully tested recipes set out in easy-to-follow steps, with many of the dishes illustrated in eighty superb color photographs.
Including regional dishes from Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Afghanistan, Cyprus and Kuwait, to name a few, this is the definitive book for anyone interested in Middle Eastern cooking.
Praise for the hardcover edition:
"Astonishing in its scope." — Craig Claiborne, The New York Times
"A tasteful tour of the Middle East. Each country is introduced with a short history, and
descriptions are given of typical cooking methods and ingredients. The food is beautifully
photographed, and recipes are easy to follow." — School Library Journal

Saha: A Chef's Journey Through Lebanon and Syria

Lucy Malouf, Greg Malouf

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Very Informational 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

This book was great, some traditional recipes, and some not so traditional twists on them as well. The one thing that bothered me was the chapter on breads. They talk and talk of Arabic Bread in the chapter, yet there is no recipe for it in the book..., anywhere. Still worth the purchase though, lots of good info and background history.

What a great book 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

WOW, being from the region and living in the US, this book took me back to all the great places in Lebanon and Syria to eat! Having the recepies too made it even all the more mouthwatering.

The photography put me right there in the middle of it all too.

Even if you never have been or are not sure about going. I highly recommend this book.

K

Hope is a weed in the Lebanon 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I thought that characterizing hope as a weed was thoughtful and apt. That comment came from a book that was written about fifteen years ago on the frightful history. Now we have a splendid cookbook where weeds of hope persist.

The book itself is a wide format with heavy paper that handles the photographs and the expansive pages well. This book is not made for the kitchen shelf. Rather it is for exposition and enjoyment of the ample text. So for the cook, the book is not efficiently organized. This book is for a reader who will put it to kitchen use at will.

If you had to classify the book, you would call it middle-eastern. But Lebanon is highly developed on its own terms including their history of contact with many cultures. Chard, crisp-fried onion, lemon and all sorts of pickles and preserves await your inspection.

Try your hand at the yogurt cheese and be impressed with your results. Make Dijon feta dressing.

Beyond Lebanon, there is Syria, which has the oldest yeast cultures known. Damascus is the oldest continually inhabited city. I was heartened to see that Armenia is included because we forget how they were almost exterminated even before the word "genocide" was coined.

So with all the bounty, there persists the bitter twinge. Read, cook and grow.

Editorial Review:

"There is no doubt that this is a country and a culinary tradition bursting with possibilities. All that's needed now, is for someone to explore them and share them with the rest of us. Fortunately, Greg and Lucy Malouf have." - Foreword by Anthony Bourdain