The Cuisines of Spain: Exploring Regional Home Cooking Review
The Cuisines of Spain: Exploring Regional Home Cooking Overview
From the array of its traditional tapas to the daring preparations of its new generation of chefs, Spain has captivated the world with its gastronomic riches. In The Cuisines of Spain, Teresa Barrenechea showcases her heritage through more than 250 recipes culled from her extensive repertoire, and from friends and fellow chefs across Spain. The famed rice dishes of Valencia, the piquant mojos of the Canary Islands, the hearty stews and braised meats of the interior–all of the classics are here in definitive form, as are many lesser-known but equally important and intriguing regional dishes.
Barrenechea weaves a captivating narrative of Spain’s diverse peoples, landscapes, and ingredients, revealing how the forces of geography, culture, and politics gave rise to the food traditions that we honor today. More than 100 photographs from Barcelona-based photojournalist Jeffrey Koehler take readers to the fields, markets, wharves, and kitchens of the provinces, and the renowned work of Christopher Hirsheimer puts Barrenechea’s recipes on brilliant display.
A celebration of home cooks past and present, The Cuisines of Spain is an enduring and intimate portrait of a great folk food tradition from one of the country’s most talented culinary ambassadors.
The Cuisines of Spain: Exploring Regional Home Cooking Specifications
Born and raised in Spain's Basque Country, Teresa Barrenechea (The Basque Table), has been very purposeful with her title, choosing the plural, cuisines, to speak of Spain in her most recent book, The Cuisines of Spain. There is no one Spanish food, plain and simple. And what the author wants to convey is a sense of place for the many delicious dishes she presents (there are over 250 recipes). It's a kind of culinary coaching, a catch up for the cooks already familiar with which dishes one can attribute to Northern Italy, say, or Sicily, or Alsatian France. Spain, and Spanish culinary traditions, remain something of a frontier. And that makes Teresa Barrenechea something of a pioneer. Exploring Regional Home Cooking: That's the sub-title of the book, and therein lies the magic.
The Cuisines of Spain is first and foremost a book to read. The author's first two chapters describe in great detail the history and geography of Spain's regions which she groups by shared climate and natural resources. She calls this "following bean stews rather than political boundaries." Woven into this tapestry are traces of the Phoenicians, ancient Greeks, Romans, Celts, Visigoths and Vandals (who left behind livestock farming practices), Moorish and Jewish culture, and, of course, the New World impacts of foods returning with Columbus--tomatoes, potatoes, corn, peppers. She gets granular--which pigs, grown where and eating what, contribute to the great hams of Spain.
She divides the book by the flow of a meal, and makes suggestions throughout which dishes would typically go together. This is if you were to choose to cook an entire Spanish meal, from tapas to dessert. You could also strive to include a single Spanish dish in your weekly meals, learning as you go, expanding a repertoire, because this is home cooking. This is about every day, not just special occasions.
The enterprising cook will find chapters devoted to "Tapas," "Cold Soups and Salads," "Vegetable Dishes and Other First Courses," "Breads," "Pies and Pastas," "Warm Soups and Legume Stews," "Rice Dishes," "Fish and Shellfish," "Poultry, Meats, and Game," "Desserts and Other Sweets," and "Beverages." There's a chapter of basic recipes as well as a list of sources for some of the more unusual ingredients.
This is a lush, beautifully illustrated and designed cookbook, as at home on a coffee table or nightstand as in the kitchen. Take the author's advice: Follow the bean stews into a new world of Old World home cooking. --Schuyler Ingle
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