Lost Arts: A Celebration of Culinary Traditions Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)This book is layed out as a series of chapters on particular topics such as making wine, vinegar, goat cheese, curing olives, making bread, etc. These chapters are then arranged as a description, with narrative, of how to make the food followed by recipes that *use the food*. So, for example, there is a chapter on making vinegar that can be summed up by: take old wine, get a mother of vinegar, let it hang out until done, (which is described) and bottle it. (with a little explanation of why you bottle). The recipes for the vinegar section then have various dressings that use vinegar.
This highlights a couple of things. First, that these foods are *simple* to make. There's nothing deep or complex about them. The foods will make themselves, if you just give a little support.
However, when I turn to the bread chapter, I am startled. The bread described uses commercial yeast, except for a very misleading section on sourdough. First, I would have thought that *this* book would emphasize sourdough bread which is easier, more fun, more tasty and, indeed, an increasingly "lost art".
I also would have thought that there would be a section on traditional preserving techniques, along the lines of the book "Keeping Foods Fresh" by Claude Aubert. The fact that it isn't highlights, I suspect, another underlying issue with the book. The imagined "good food" is western Mediterranean in origin. And the closer the better. It would have been interesting to consider some of the wonderful techniques used in Greece or Yugoslavia. That would get a range of fascinating things like pickled capers, cabbage and grape leaves, which would be very compatible with the spirit of the book and would have made a much more fascinating range.

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Product Description:
Hand-cured olives, home-baked bread, fresh goat cheese: Before Whole Foods and Trader Joe's, the only way to enjoy these pure and simple flavors was to make them the old-fashioned way-by hand. This charming little guide will teach you how to blend your own mustards, crush grapes for wine, bottle vinegar at home, and more. Sure, you can buy these things at the neighborhood farmers market, but Alley's instructions are so easy, you'll be inspired to add her age-old techniques to your culinary repertoire. The sumptuous recipes at the end of each chapter enable you to put the fruits of your labor to good use.

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