| ||||||||||||||||||
![]() Trade In this Item for up to £0.90
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Lebanese Cuisine for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.90, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Product details
|
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Readers cannot gain an overview of Lebanese cuisine from this book. There is no information on daily meals and no menus. In her discussion of appetizers, Ms. Helou doesn't explain the philosophy behind the partaking of mezze or that it is customarily accompanied with araq in Christian communities. Although the author includes recipes for fried and scrambled eggs as well as a recipe for an Arab omelet, she says nothing about hard-cooked or poached eggs or the local version of the French omelet, all of which are prepared in delicious and unusual ways. She also neglects to explain how the Arab omelet differs from the French one. In her chapter on fish, Ms. Helou fails to mention the varieties of saltwater fish favored by the Lebanese, for example Sultan Ibrahim (red mullet). Nor is there any mention of the much-prized flat lobsters. There is also nothing said about the country's freshwater fish (such as trout) or about frogs' legs, snails, or batarekh (boutargue). In her discussion of desserts, the author neglects to mention that Tripoli has long been celebrated for its sweets, that nammoura is a specialty of Zahleh, and that Sidon is famous for sanyoura and barazik.
There is little or no information on such ingredients as pomegranates and pomegranate molasses or syrup, grape molasses, fresh nuts in season (almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts, and pistachios), fresh green chickpeas, fava (broad) beans, skinless whole-grain wheat, phyllo pastry, soapwort, and sumac juice. Furthermore, some of the ingredient information is incorrect. For instance, habbat el-barakeh (nigella) is wrongly identified as black cumin (a common error), shirsh el-halaweh (soapwort) as bois de Panama, and very fine bulgur (sreyseerah) is more than once referred to as f'reyfeerah.
There are other inaccuracies. For example, Ms. Helou writes that stuffed vegetables are always served with a bowl of yogurt. Actually, those that contain a vegetarian stuffing based on rice and olive oil are not customarily accompanied with it. A recipe for potato pie, which contains no bulgur and has nothing to do with potato kibbeh, is wrongly identified as Kibbet Batatah!
Don't be misled by the jacket reviews of this book. Regrettably, it is neither "fully comprehensive" nor a "major work".
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
|
|
|