2 comments about Lonely Planet World Food Ireland (Lonely Planet World Food Guides).

1. Very entertaining and informative, this little book was a pleasure to read. Written by Irish folks, it offers witty commentary on the social and cultural traditions of Ireland as well as discussing the wholesome and delicious cuisine. If you've got any interest in Ireland at all, you're sure to enjoy this wonderful guide.



2. This is a really great book. It covers not only the subject of Irish food, but also gives information on the culture and a brief history of Ireland. The book is packed with information, maps and beautiful photographs. It is a really helpful book for anyone interested in Ireland.

No comments about Food & Feast in Tudor England (Food & Feasts).

1 comments about Victory Cookbook: Nostalgic Food and Facts from 1940-1954.

1. This book includes a previous book that Ms. Patten wrote "We'll Eat Again" (which I already own). She provides some fabulous recipes of homely cooking used by the British housewife during the rather trying times of WWII and thereafter. I love the recipes, I love the little history lessons throughout and the samples of advertising from the era. It's a time that's fast fading from our memories so I'm glad there are books like this to remind us of what life was like. My favorite comment from Ms. Patten is in the beginning of the book where she suggests we try the recipes to see that many of them are (indeed) tasty while others will show us why we're all glad we no longer have to consume them! I've tried several of the recipes (vinegar cake is a winner...so is the Potato Jane....the onion/apple chutney was a huge hit last winter). I can't bring myself to try the sheep's head stew though. It's amazing how they made do and stretched things and everyone ended up healthier than before the war. This book is a wealth of information - read and enjoy!

1 comments about Ted Hughes's Tales from Ovid (Faber plays).

1. Erotic, comical, dramatic, shocking, and mystical, this is a fascinating collection of some of Ovid's greatest stories. Adapted for the stage, these ancient stories embody some of the most pressing issues in modern society, while paying homage to their deep roots in classical antiquity. A must-read for the student of classical studies and mythology, and anyone with an imagination or a yen for the fanciful. The characters of Juno, Jupiter, Bacchus and others are brought to life and highlighed with amazing color and depth. This is your chance to acquaint - or refamiliarize yourself - with the ancient world. You will not be disappointed!

5 comments about Elegant Irish Cooking: Hundreds of Recipes from the World's Foremost Irish Chefs.

1. I saw a demonstration he gave using recipes from this book a few weeks ago. The samples provided were outstanding. I went home and made the smoked salmon stuffed chicken breast, and it was a hit with everyone



2. The recipes in this book are terrific! Anyone looking for an escape from "traditional" Irish cookery books will love these unique and tasty recipes. Well worth the price! Clear, consise directions. Even the beginner cook will be able to make these dishes tonight! (All that being said, some related books I'd like to recommend on generations-old Irish recipes are Irish Heritage Cooking, Irish Traditional Cooking, and Celtic Folklore Cooking.)



3. Elegant Irish Cooking is an impressive compendium of 166 classic and progressive recipes in celebration of Irish cuisine and culinary traditions. Relying heavily on indigenous ingredients, these fabulous recipes showcase the techniques, excellence, and variety of Irish dining. From Pan Roasted Quail with Kildare Boxty; Cream of Watercress Soup with Warm Herbal Drop Scones; and Poached Sole Fillets in a Clonmel Cider Sauce; to Warm Salad of Emyvale Duck with Orange and Balsamic Dressing; Roasted Rack of Wicklow Lamb with an Herb Crust and Mint-Butter Sauce; and Moore Street Vegetable Tart, (and enhanced throughout with color photography by Ron Manville), Elegant Irish Cooking will grace any cookbook collection and enhance any family meal or celebratory occasion.



4. The book is beautiful and full of history and depth. The recipes are authentic and delicious. Highly recommended for a beautiful St. Patrick's Day dinner or night of Irish food.



5. `Elegant Irish Cooking' by culinary scholar, teacher and professional chef, Noel C. Cullen Ed.D, CMC, AAC is a great foodie book; however it may not be the first Irish cookbook you want to get if all you want is a good cookbook with traditional Irish recipes. If that is what you need, go for `Irish Traditional Cooking' by leading Irish cooking school owner, Darina Allen or the much more ethnographic `Celtic Folklore Cooking' by culinary writer and folklorist, JoAnne Asala.
   
   If Irish culinary traditions and cooking are major interests for you, this is an excellent second or third Irish cookbook, depending on whether you are more interested in cooking technique, fine dining and entertaining, or culinary lore. If your primary interest is in technique, get `ballymaloe cooking school cookbook' by school co-owner and Irish TV cooking show host, Darina Allen. Otherwise, go with this one.
   
   Due to the author's dual life as both a chef and an academic, the book offers rewards for both interests. While Cullen is currently a professor in culinary and hospitality skills at Boston College, he trained and worked as a serious high end chef in many Irish and French restaurant kitchens and learned first hand the lessons of cooking to local products, at the same time unlearning his French cooking doctrines while he reached the upper levels of Irish `haute cuisine'.
   
   The book begins with an excellent essay on the history of Irish food, including its high point during the Middle Ages monasteries and its low points during the potato famine. My only disappointment with this chapter is that it does not explain the mystery of why agronomists did not import one or more of the hundreds of other New World potatoes into Ireland when the potato blight affected only that one strain on which Irish livelyhood depended. On the other hand, this essay is very revealing about the curious fact that while Ireland is an Island, like the Greek Islands, there is a lot less seafood eaten than one may expect. Most fishing yields are sold to foreign markets or the Irish simply do not have a great taste for the fruits of the ocean, other than salmon and trout.
   
   The title of the book and the author's background are excellent indicators of what we are given with the recipes in this book. We do not get standard recipes for traditional Irish dishes, although all the most traditional Irish produce such as milk, cream, cheese, apples, pears, potatoes, berries, lamb, pork, and game are well represented. Also represented is the one type of ingredient Ireland shares with another major Island nation Japan. This ingredient is seaweed. In fact, seaweed is historically important in that those who lived near the sea escaped the worst of the potato famine, not because they had fish, but because they had seaweed to eat.
   
   While the book is primarily dedicated to Irish `haute cuisine', there is much here for the average cook. Opening the book at random shows me an excellent opening section in the chapter on `Salads, Dressings, & Cold Sauces' which details many variations on the classic French Vinaigrette. This may not be earthshaking for someone with 20 French cookbooks on their shelves, but for someone who only has room for a few good Irish cookbooks, this is great stuff.
   
   I also find Cullen's plan for presenting a recipe very appealing, where each step is numbered, making it very easy to keep one's place in the procedure. It also means that each step is clearly identified, instead of being buried in a dense paragraph of text. This is especially rewarding in that the same gool schema is applied to all recipes, even those many which were contributed by `guest chefs', major chefs at restaurants and schools in Ireland. This also means that the many recipes which do not have a `guest chef' author are the creations of the book's author.
   
   If by some chance, you have only room for a single Irish cookbook and this one appeals to you, I must say that many traditional dishes do find their way into the book; however, I cannot guarantee that the procedure is the same you would find at home in a private house in Dublin.
   
   I especially recommend this book over `The New Irish Table' by Irish-American culinary journalist, Margaret M. Johnson, which also deals with recipes from Irish cooks, but more from the local pub than from the larger restaurants.
   
   Last but not least, I find this an exceptionally well designed book for the average list price of $35. An excellent addition to any cookbook collection, and most especially to an Irish cookbook collection.

2 comments about Ireland's Comfort Food & Touring Attractions.

1. Wonderful selection. Have fun with the recipes as well as reading about cool places.



2. I purchased this book on an impulse. I was a fellow participant at a book festival when this book "walked" past me and I was charmed by the cover illustration.The fact that the word "Ireland" was in the title didn't hurt either, as I am a nut for anything of the Celtic persuasion. Well,not being fond of cooking hasn't kept me from enjoying each and every page of this book, which is so much MORE than a book about food and cooking. Little bits and pieces of traveling advice, interesting observations about the country and people,lovely photos, and tidbits of Irish trivia. And so,even I, the least enthusiastic cook in the world, am anxious to give many of these recipes a try. Who can resist recipes with names like: "Curragh of Kildare Irish Stew" and " Grandma Murphy's Broccoli and Blue Cheese Soup"... Yum! The book is beautifully done, of nice quality and certainly deserving of the IPPY Award it received.

1 comments about At Home in Ireland : Cooking and Entertaining With Ava Astaire McKenzie.

1. Beautiful pictures, wonderful recipes, and a nice note or two with picture of Ava's famous Father. You can see that a lot of time and effort went into this book.

2 comments about Eating for Victory: Healthy Home Front Cooking on War Rations (Official Wwii Info Reproductns).

1. A wealth of information we all might need in the near future. Recipes from limited ingredients, how to make dishes go further, feeding a family well, and use of nourishing food in preference to empty calories. Instruction on nutrition so that all may be fed well and not be too ill or tired to carry on day to day. Commonsense, but we all need to be reminded at times.



2. This book needs to be bigger--a LOT bigger! It's full of facsimiles of brochures sent out to British wives to help conserve foods for the war effort, and the recipes and tips inside EASILY translate into today's Obama economic crunch.
   
   Inside, the recipes are written in standard measurements (before England went metric), so American housewives can easily use them straightaway.
   
   You ask me, the cookbook industry needs to pull it's head out and bring back simple, honest recipes made more-with-less like these.
   
   I'm off to find more such cookbooks! If you're a frugalite, GET THIS BOOK.
   
   I had to wait a long time for delivery, but this book came from Britain--the REAL DEAL and was worth the wait.

2 comments about Cooking and Dining in Medieval England.

1. If you have any idea of how people ate in England six hundred years ago, you may well have gotten it from Hollywood productions featuring castles in which rollicking banqueters dined exclusively on whole suckling pig, and practiced their belching and food-throwing at table. It won't come as any surprise that what makes good movies can make bad history. If you are interested in food, cooking, and historic recipes, and you want to get a more accurate picture than Hollywood offers, Peter Brears is your man. He started work in British museums fifty years ago, and worked in the excavation of various castles. He not only catalogued domestic artifacts but used reproductions of the old tools, old stoves, and old foodstuffs to bring forth authentic medieval banquets. In a massive study, _Cooking & Dining in Medieval England_ (Prospect Books), Brears looks at every aspect of the subject, from kitchen design, tools, and techniques to what happened to the leftovers when all was done. The chapters, each of which explains a specific office of the kitchen like the bakehouse or the saucery, have recipes included, so that those who want to eat like knights and their ladies can do so. Each chapter is also richly illustrated with useful line drawings by the author himself, making this a particularly good-looking volume.
   
   Kitchens were integrally planned within medieval castles and houses. These ancient structures were planned out, not thrown together, and we even know the names of some of the architects. Since the kitchen was a central core of domestic effort, the architects took its situation into consideration, first with detached kitchens and then with those integral within the castle. The architect had to plan for security of food and utensils, efficiency of food preparation, and cleanliness. Every department gets its chapter here, including the Dairy, the Brewhouse, the Boiling House, and the Buttery. That last one has nothing to do with dairy products, but rather of the butts, or barrels, of liquid refreshment. There is a fascinating chapter on kitchen tools, many of which would not look out of place in a modern kitchen. Others like horsetail plants used to clean pewter are long gone (the plant was called "scourwort" or "pewterwort"). Brears explains that the meals were timed to daylight hours, which would be very early in the winter, and the fare of course varied by season, but varied most of all because of religious proscriptions in a complicated calendar of feast and fast days. He also points out that there was cleverness (or knavery) in getting around meatless days or weeks. It was all right, some said, during all-fish fasts to serve barnacle geese since these were from barnacles or even grew on trees, and since beavers had scales on their tails, the tail ("weight up to 4 lb, and being very good eating") was acceptable.
   
   You won't find beaver tails in the extensive recipes here, nor such things as lampreys which were considered a great delicacy. You will find hedgehog, but thankfully this a pork ball fitted with almond slivers to act as hedgehog spines. There is other whimsy here: you might try cooking a cockatrice, a mythical creature believed hatched from a hen's egg incubated by a snake. This chimera was manufactured with the front part of a rooster joined to the hind of a pig. Do not be surprised to find Cream Bastard ("A Custard Without Yolks"). You will find plenty of pottage, but Brears reminds us that this is merely a term for something cooked in a pot. He has apparently had experience with medieval re-enactors who get this wrong. "`This,' they exclaim, "is pottage!" - thrusting forward a bowl of grim, grey, and gritty gruel, unskimmed, smoke-flavoured and foul. Any medieval cook who served such a mess would have been soundly disciplined or, perhaps even worse, made to eat it." He also berates the chefs on TV who bake "pig's heads in the oven without any preparation, thus producing an unhygienic, inedible, and wasteful mess, totally alien to the magnificent medieval dish." Let them instead follow his extensive directions here, starting with boning and pickling three weeks ahead of serving, and finishing with re-insertion of the tusks for show, and half-cherries for eyes. The recipes are modernized when necessary; medieval cooks used a lot of verjuice, for instance, which was commonly the juice of crab apples, and here lemon juice or white wine vinegar is substituted. And if you really want to get medieval, you can make all the food and prepare a party such as the one for Archbishop Neville's enthronement, which Brears illustrates comic-book style in seventy panels, from setting up the tables to everyone's departure. If Brears ever asks you to dinner, go. In the chapter on the saucery, he tells about making Sauce Ginger, Sauce Parsley, Sauce Rous, and more, explaining that these were kept in tall jugs in the medieval saucery, but "I now keep them all in glass jars for use at everyday meals."



2. Rob Hardy's wonderful review says it all--almost. I want to add that anthropologists like me will LOVE this book--it's both archaeologically and culturally sophisticated, and even has some biological anthro (nutrition levels) and linguistics (lots on Middle English), thus hitting all our "four fields." In particular, it's an archaeologists' dream, correcting a lot of mistakes in the archeo literature and adding much to knowledge.
   Historians will also benefit. The old nonsense about Europe being boorish and uncouth in the Middle Ages, with kings wiping their hands on passing dogs or throwing food at each other, is still very much with us, and Norbert Elias' nonsense about "civilizing missions" is still taken seriously. This book corrects all that, going into great detail about medieval manners, which, for the elite, were more persnickety than anything today, and even for the ordinary people were pretty refined. The fact is that there has never been a society without table manners. Even small hunting-gathering bands have their etiquette and taboos.
   It is worth noting that Brears is such a good writer that the reader never tires of even the most minute descriptions of buckets, knives, and tablecloths. Especially if the reader is an archaeology junkie (as I am), but I should think anyone who cares about food would be interested.
   The recipes are modernized and thus much more usable than the originals, which never bother with things like quantity or preparation details.
   Overall, the reader gets an amazing sense of what real life was like in that world. Brears quotes the old proverb "the past is a different country," and indeed the English middle ages was little like anything today--though many of the high points of this book are Brears' reminiscences of his experience with ancient customs still practiced in remote corners of Britain in his youth.

No comments about A Year at Ballymaloe Cookery School.