Cookbook Profile: Home Cooking Around The World

Home Cooking Around The World

By David Ricketts

Home Cooking

"What I've learned over the years, from both my professional food career and from traveling, is that the main ingredients are usually very similar, regardless of where you are. It's the seasonings that make the difference..."

In Home Cooking Around The World (Stewart, Tabori & Chang), food journalist David Ricketts presents a tantalizing tour of "comfort-food" from all corners of the earth. Classic American favorites like chicken noodle soup, tuna casserole, beef stew, mashed potatoes, and rice pudding all receive dazzling makeovers in Home Cooking Around The World.

Ricketts helps the home cook put more global zing into dishes by showing how to transform familiar combinations into new dishes with foreign accents. Thus, by changing seasonings and a few ingredients, beef stew turns into spicy, fragrant Moroccan Pot Roast with Apricots and Hard-Cooked Eggs, or becomes Braised Beef with Oregano and Cardamom, or Flemish Carbonnade with Carrots.

He also includes many wonderful recipes less familiar to American home cooks that are classic comfort-food dishes in different parts of the world: Balinese Spicy Shrimp Packets, Portuguese Chickpea Soup, Peruvian Chicken Stew, Indonesian Green Bean Salad, Albanian Cornmeal Pie, and Asian Black Rice Pudding are among the delicious examples.

As exotic as many of the dishes may sound, the flavors of recipes in Home Cooking Around The World have broad appeal—the whole family will enjoy them. The recipes are also easy. Many dishes can be made in one pot or skillet or casserole. There are no fussy preparations and—as the author points out—"some of the dishes also benefit from being prepared a day or two ahead, so flavors can develop and mature."

The magic of these recipes lies in the use of local herbs and spices, not in any hard-to-find ingredients or complicated cooking, In case an ingredient isn't easily found at local markets, Ricketts provides a detailed glossary of ingredients as well as a source listing.

Home Cooking Around The World also invites readers along on a culinary tour of the world, as long-time food journalist and globe-trotter David Ricketts offers a personal—and often humorous—anecdote for every recipe. He tells where the dish originates, how he came upon the recipe, and how it relates to the local culinary cultures. Whether it sprang from an adventure in the winding streets of Hanoi, or a neighborhood cafe in Prague or Lima, Peru, a detour through Albania or a wedding feast in the Kerala Province in India, every dish does have a story!

Author David Ricketts has written about food for more than twenty years. He is a contributing food editor to Family Circle, recipe editor for Rosie magazine, and a freelance food writer who has written cookbooks with Babe the Pig, country singer Naomi Judd, and fitness guru Richard Simmons.

Buy the Book!

Home Cooking Around The World:
A Recipe Collection
By David Ricketts
Photographs by Mark Thomas
Published in October 2001 by Stewart, Tabori & Chang
Hardcover, $35
208 Pages / 80 recipes
ISBN: 1-58479-092-X
Information provided by the publisher.