A selection of cookbooks published by Serif arrived recently. This independent publisher specialises in good books that deserve not to go out of print, and certainly this little pile excited me, not only for the intriguing recipes but also for the good reading.
There was Joyce Westrip's Moghul Cooking: India's Courtly Cuisine first published in 1997 with delights like rose-scented chicken kebabs served with rose and raisin chutney, aubergines with tamarind, cauliflower with crunchy nuts and orange sharbat.
From the other side of the subcontinent, Chitrita Banerji's Bengali Cooking: Seasons and Festivals is as much a memoir as a cookbook, with recipes interspersed with the text. Here are recipes such as duck with coconut milk, patishapta (a sort of sweet stuffed pancake) and several khichuris (rice and lentils cooked together and spiced in various ways), a simple, comforting and nourishing everyday food.
Mark Grant's Roman Cookery: Ancient Recipes For Modern Kitchens celebrates the food of everyday meals across the ancient empire, rather than the elite banqueting food of Apicius featured in many other works on Roman food. The classics teacher and keen cook has dug out descriptions of food and recipes from all sorts of obscure sources and presents recipes as enticing as walnut and fig cakes and sesame wafers, through hearty lentil and red wine stew to pig's trotters with pearl barley and Carthaginian porridge made of wheat flakes, cheese, honey and egg.
Casablanca in Morocco conjures up all sorts of romantic images and Aline Benayoun reveals the lost world of the pied noir cook, that of the French colonists in Casablanca Cuisine: French North African Cooking.
They borrowed ideas and ingredients from their Arab neighbours and Jewish Sephardic traditions, cooking meat with fruit, spicing French vegetables with cumin, and adapting couscous to their own tastes. It's a fascinating melding of ingredients, methods, traditions and influences.
Edouard de Pomaine (1875-1964) was a French scientist of Polish extraction, who also loved cooking. His Cooking in 10 Minutes, first published in 1930, is an interesting little book with simple French recipes. Some are well worth trying - fillets of sole with mushrooms, moules marinier (mussels sailor-style), or Provencal tomatoes, but others are dated, such as vegetables with cream, tinned spinach in butter or calf's head in butter.
Nevertheless it's an insight into fast home-cooked food between the wars.
Diet guru James Duigan's Clean & Lean Diet Cookbook (Kyle) came across my desk recently. He numbers among his clients celebrities such as Elle Macpherson and Nigella Lawson, and his advice and recipes are generally healthy - the more nutrients you get the less you will crave unhealthy food and the better you will feel, he says. It's not too faddy a diet. Although he does sell supplements, they are not required in the recipes except in a few smoothies.
However, he spouts all the usual admonitions, rules and meal plans of diet pedlars through the ages.
Sensibly, he eschews sugar, alcohol, fizzy drinks, processed foods, artificial colours, sweeteners, additives and preservatives. The diet is high in protein, including lean meat, fish, nuts, tofu and eggs. There is not a lot of carbohydrates apart from vegetables and fruit and some whole grains like brown rice, oats or quinoa, but it includes plenty of fresh vegetables and fruit. Despite it being a diet book peddling hope, the recipes are quite enticing, such as green beans with coconut and black mustard seeds with grilled salmon, or lentils, pecan and roast beetroot salad with goat's cheese.
Mediterranean or Asian food have been in our sights for so many years that we've forgotten the cuisines of other countries. It's good to see Margareth Schildt Landgren's sumptuously illustrated Notes from a Swedish Kitchen (New Holland) which introduces us to Scandinavian food. Her recipes are a mix of traditional and festive, like St Lucia buns, nettle soup, or gravlax with herbs and, of course, open sandwiches and smorgasbords. There are several recipes for preserves, necessary where the winter is long and snowbound. Wild food features, too: rosehips, blackberries, mushrooms, lingonberries and cloudberries.
Some ingredients like herring, common in northern Europe, are hard to find here, but there are plenty of other recipes using fresh seasonal produce in this book - salmon, dill, potatoes, cheese and dairy products, baked goods, such as vasterbooen cheese tart (to eat with crayfish), potato cakes with bacon, blueberry pie, baked beetroot with feta cream or ginger Christmas biscuits are all easily achievable, and sound delicious.
