“Peppered with anecdotes on life, food, and Middle Eastern culture, this book will provide real foodies with a classic they can enjoy for years to come” (The Oxford Time). This wide-ranging treasury of recipes from the Middle East—with dishes from the plains of Georgia to Afghanistan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Persia, and Armenia—is a wonderful tour of rich culinary traditions that has become a modern classic, guiding us first around the mezzeh table and then leading us on to soups, salads, savories, pilafs, kebabs, casseroles, and grills that make the best use of meat, fish, and poultry. Middle Eastern Cookery explains the different spices that are favored by different countries—mint for Armenia, cumin for Iran, and more—and with each recipe comes a piece of history or a fable, making this book an enjoyable reading experience as well as an incomparable and comprehensive cookbook.
This remarkable and beautifully illustrated book describes over 75 ingredients used in Middle Eastern cooking. The cuisines covered include those of Iran, Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian Territories, Jordan, Egypt, Yemen, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman; Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Influenced by the Persian, Islamic, and Ottoman Empires, these country's common culinary tradition also reveals the legacy of the Byzantine and Roman empires. The insightful texts take readers and cooks into the history and diversity of these ancient cultures, while 150 recipes allow them to put their knowledge of these ingredients to practical use. Each ingredient is broken down in sections on descriptions and tastes of the spices, historical background, and cultivation or manufacture methods. Each is illustrated with specially commissioned photographs.
Growing up in an Arab American household, rich traditional Arabic dishes were central to Blanche's family's life. However she noticed that previous generations of her family did not document these heirloom recipes on paper, but passed the cooking techniques only by word of mouth. So Blanche began a mission of cultural preservation, taking down the cooking methods and exact ingredients of these hundreds of year old recipes. She launched a popular YouTube cooking show called ''Feast in the Middle East'' to not only share these recipes with her family, but with the world. Some of these dishes are classical favorites, like smoky Syrian Muhammara dip with walnuts, pomegranate molasses and roasted peppers, ''Warak Enab, '' or rice and lamb rolled into tender grape leaves and cooked in a tomato broth, or Lebanese semolina custard scented with rose water called ''Layali Lubnan'' or ''Lebanese Nights''. Other dishes, like Musakhan, come from small and obscure villages like Ein Erik in the Palestinian West Bank. Musakhan is a sumac spiced chicken roasted on bread and smothered with caramelized onions and toasted pine nuts. Ancient recipes like chewy semolina date ring cookies called Ma'moul commemorate both Easter and Ramadan, while an over 1000 year old cinnamon spiced bulgur wheat porridge called Burbarra celebrates the Feast of Santa Barbara in the Arab Levant, Malta, and even Eastern Europe. While many of these dishes used to take hours to make, Blanche modernized these recipes to adapt to today's western palate and busy lifestyles. Readers will be able to recreate street foods like Chicken Shawarma and crispy Felafel in their own kitchens using easy techniques and familiar ingredients. Fusion dishes like Baklava Granola with pistachios and cardamom, Middle Eastern Nachos or ''Machos'' with pita chips and cucumber yogurt sauce, and a Lemon Cheesecake made with creamy labneh cheese adapt middle eastern spices and ingredients to western tastes. Today the ''Feast in the Middle East'' YouTube series has brought together a global cooking community in an unexpected and beautiful way. Now viewers are making these recipes in the United States, Canada, India, Australia, Spain, Korea and beyond. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY: Blanche Araj Shaheen is the YouTube personality and host of the popular cooking show, Feast in the Middle East. Prior to her foray into food, she was a television host and reporter in both entertainment and news. She reported and hosted programs for PBS, G4 Television, and Link Media's ''Mosaic World News of the Middle East.'' She also became the first Arab American entertainment reporter, as a contributor for the ABC live show called ''View From the Bay.'' In 2010 Blanche made the switch to hosting her own YouTube cooking show, sharing heirloom recipes preserved by her mother and grandmother. With her journalism background, she decided to document the recipes in this cookbook, and Feast in the Middle East was born. She gives the historical relevance of many signature dishes, and shares personal stories from her own family traditions and trips to the Middle East. Aside from her ongoing cooking series on YouTube, Blanche's Feast In the Middle East has been featured on Virgin America Airlines AUTHOR HOME: Los Altos, C
** FREE SAMPLER ** `Cookery to me is about history and connection, but to remain vibrant, a cuisine must also evolve.' Thus author Rawia Bishara explains her approach in this book. She believes one of the greatest assets of Middle Eastern cuisine is its inherent fluidity, its remarkable capacity to adapt and transform over time. In Levant, she offers more than 100 recipes that represent a new modern style. These are the very best of the dishes she has developed over the last twenty years in her New York City restaurant for the contemporary palate. Relying on a traditional pantry (including olive oil, tahini, za'atar, sumac), she updates classic flavour profiles to dazzling effect. The Mediterranean diet has always been a healthy one, with so many of what we now call `superfoods' at its base. But here Rawia takes it a step further by focusing on dishes that are naturally vegetarian or vegan and gluten-free, as well as meat dishes where vegetables take the leading role. These recipes represent the way more and more people eat and cook today. Among them are Cauliflower `Steak' with Pomegranate Molasses, Roasted Beetroot Hummus, Jerusalem Artichoke and Beef Stew, Peppers with Walnut Stuffing and Freekeh and Butternut Squash Salad. Levant explores the sensational cross-cultural possibilities of culinary exchange; it sets the path for the future of Middle Eastern cooking. www.tanoreen.com @tanoreen
The Fertile Crescent region—the swath of land comprising a vast portion of today’s Middle East—has long been regarded as pivotal to the rise of civilization. Alongside the story of human development, innovation, and progress, there is a culinary tradition of equal richness and importance. In The Culinary Crescent: A History of Middle Eastern Cuisine, Peter Heine combines years of scholarship with a personal passion: his knowledge of the cookery traditions of the Umayyad, Abbasid, Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal courts is matched only by his love for the tastes and smells produced by the contemporary cooking of these areas today. In addition to offering a fascinating history, Heine presents more than one hundred recipes—from the modest to the extravagant—with dishes ranging from those created by the “celebrity chefs” of the bygone Mughal era, up to gastronomically complex presentations of modern times. Beautifully produced, designed for both reading and cooking, and lavishly illustrated in color throughout, The Culinary Crescent is sure to provide a delectable window in the history of food in the Middle East.
NEW IN PAPERBACK The vegetarian cuisine of the Middle East and North Africa is a treasure chest of pungent herbs and spices, aromatic stews and soups, chewy falafels and breads, couscous, stuffed grape leaves, greens and vegetables, hummus, pizzas, pies, omelets, pastries and sweets, smooth yogurt drinks, and strong coffees. Originally the food of peasants too poor for meat, vegetarian cooking in the Middle East developed over thousands of years into a culinary art form influenced both by trade and invasion. It is as rich and varied in its history as it is in flavor—culinary historians estimate the Arab kitchen has over 40,000 dishes! Now noted food writer Habeeb Salloum has culled 330 savory jewels from this never-ending storehouse to create Classic Vegetarian Cooking from the Middle East—a rich, healthful, and economical introduction to flavors and aromas that have stood the test of time.
The definitive volume on Middle Eastern cooking, a modern classic from the award-winning, bestselling author of The Book of Jewish Food and Claudia Roden's Mediterranean Originally published in 1972 and hailed by James Beard as "a landmark in the field of cookery," this new version represents the accumulation of the author's years of extensive travel throughout the ever-changing landscape of the Middle East, gathering recipes and stories. Now featuring more than 800 recipes, including the aromatic variations that accent a dish and define the country of origin: fried garlic and cumin and coriander from Egypt, cinnamon and allspice from Turkey, sumac and tamarind from Syria and Lebanon, pomegranate syrup from Iran, preserved lemon and harissa from North Africa. Claudia Roden has worked out simpler approaches to traditional dishes, using healthier ingredients and time-saving methods without ever sacrificing any of the extraordinary flavor, freshness, and texture that distinguish the cooking of this part of the world. Throughout these pages she draws on all four of the region's major cooking styles: • The refined haute cuisine of Iran, based on rice exquisitely prepared and embellished with a range of meats, vegetables, fruits, and nuts • Arab cooking from Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan—at its finest today, and a good source for vegetable and bulgur wheat dishes • The legendary Turkish cuisine, with its kebabs, wheat and rice dishes, yogurt salads, savory pies, and syrupy pastries • North African cooking, particularly the splendid fare of Morocco, with its heady mix of hot and sweet, orchestrated to perfection in its couscous dishes and tagines From the tantalizing mezze—succulent bites of filled fillo crescents and cigars, chopped salads, and stuffed morsels, as well as tahina, chickpeas, and eggplant in their many guises—to the skewered meats and savory stews and hearty grain and vegetable dishes, here is a rich array of Middle Eastern cooking.
More than 500 recipes from the subtle, spicy, varied cuisines of the Middle East, ranging from inexpensive but tasty peasant fare to elaborate banquet dishes.
"An Edible Mosaic nudges the basic cook into the world of Middle Eastern cooking with simple, approachable recipes that jump off the page and into your kitchen. Faith turns creative combinations of real food and spices into beautiful dishes packed with flavor and nutrition. --Kath Younger, KatEats.com blog"
