Noteworthy: A Collection of Recipes from the Ravinia Festival
Author: Ravinia Festival Womens Board
This award-winning cookbook was brilliantly orchestrated by the Ravinia Festival Women's Board as a way to raise money for music scholarships and the venerated music festival. This harmonious collection of more than 600 recipes is the result of three years of collecting, testing, tasting, collating, and indexing. These dishes stand the test of time and include spectacular picnic fare, simple family dinners, and special occasion dishes. With recipes ranging from homey pumpkin bread and elegant leek and chevre tarts to simple pickled beets and lavish Chicken Wellington with Champagne Sauce, there are choices to suit everyone's tastes. Music lovers might want to try guest conductor Claudio Abbado's Crab Caponata and Ravinia music director James Levine's Classic Chicken Salad, or Variations on a Brownie and Summer Symphony Soup. These scores of recipes for every cook, from the novice to the gourmet, make a great hostess, wedding, or shower gift.
Author Biography: The Ravinia Festival Women's Board is dedicated to the support of the Ravinia Festival in Highland Park, Illinois.
Interesting book: Bipolar Teen or The Wall Street Diet
Glorious Foods of Greece: Traditional Recipes from the Islands, Cities, and Villages
Author: Diane Kochilas
The Glorious Foods of Greece is the magnum opus of Greek cuisine, the first book that takes the reader on a long and fascinating journey beyond the familiar Greece of blue-and-white postcard images and ubiquitous grilled fish and moussaka into the country's many different regions, where local customs and foodways have remaained intact for eons.
The journey is both personal and inviting. Diane Kochilas spent nearly a decade crisscrossing Greece's Pristine mountains, mainland, and islands, visiting cooks, bakers, farmers, shepherds, fishermen, artisan producers of cheeses, charcuterie, olives, olive oil, and more, in order to document the country's formidable culinary traditions. The result is a paean to the hitherto uncharted glories of local Greek cooking and regional lore that takes you from mountain villages to urban tables to seaside tavernas and island gardens.
In beautiful prose and with more than four hundred unusual recipes -- many of them never before recorded -- invites us to a Greece few visitors ever get to see. Along the way she serves up feast after feast of food, history, and culture from a land where the three have been intertwined since time immemorial.
In an informed introduction, she sets the historic framework of the cuisine, so that we clearly see the differences among the earthy mountain cookery, the sparse, ingenious island table, and the sophisticated aromaticcooking traditions of the Greeks in diaspora. In each chapter she takes stock of the local pantry and cooking customs. From the olive-laden Peloponnesos, she brings us such unusual dishes as One-Pot Chicken Simmered with Artichokes and served with Tomato-Egg-Lemon Sauce and VineLeaves Stuffed with Salt Cod. From the Venetian-influenced Ionian islands, she offers up such delights asPastry-Cloaked Pasta from Corfu filled with cheese and charcuterie and delicious Bread Pudding from Ithaca with zabaglione. Her mainland recipes, as well as those that hail from Greece's impenetrable northwestern mountains, offer an enticing array of dozens of delicious savory pies, unusual greens dishes, and succulent meat preparations such as Lamb with Garlic and Cheese Baked in Paper. In Macedonia she documents the complex, perfumed, urbane cuisine that defines that region. In the Aegean islands, she serves up a wonderful repertory of exotic yet simple foods, reminding us how accessible -- and healthful -- is the Greek fegional table.
The result is a cookbook unlike any other that has ever been written on Greek cuisine, one that brims with the author's love and knowledge of her subject, a tribute to the vibrant, multifaceted continuum of Greek cooking, both highly informed and ever inviting. The Glorious Foods of Greece is an important work, one that contributes generously to the culinary literature and is sure to become the definitive book of Greek cuisine and culture for future generations of food lovers -- Greek and non-Greek alike.
Mort Rosenblum
Diane Kochilas sheds warm, wonderous light on the Mediterranean's best-kept culinary secret: the range and flavor of real Greek food. From the hubbub of Athens' market to old stone kitchens on forgotten islands, she lets us savor what we have been missing.
Joyce Goldstein
The Glorious Foods of Greece is plainly a labor of love and intelligence. You will be amazed by the incredible regional diversity of Greek cuisine. Diane's passion for Greek cuisine and her attention to detail make the recipes come alive with their vibrant sense of place.
Nancy Harmon Jenkins
This is a splendid achievement—beautifully written, dense with information, and offered with a rare warmth and generosity of spirit.
Mort Rosenblum
Diane Kochilas sheds warm, wonderous light on the Mediterranean's best-kept culinary secret: the range and flavor of real Greek food. From the hubbub of Athens' market to old stone kitchens on forgotten islands, she lets us savor what we have been missing.
Nancy Harmon Jenkins
This is a splendid achievement—beautifully written, dense with information, and offered with a rare warmth and generosity of spirit.
Joyce Goldstein
The Glorious Foods of Greece is plainly a labor of love and intelligence. You will be amazed by the incredible regional diversity of Greek cuisine. Diane's passion for Greek cuisine and her attention to detail make the recipes come alive with their vibrant sense of place.
Publishers Weekly
With this massive and masterful collection, Kochilas (an American with Greek roots who works in Athens as a food reporter for a Greek newspaper) brings Greek cooking front and center in American kitchens. Region by region (the Ionian Islands, the Cyclades, etc.), she provides over 400 appealing Mediterranean recipes. Fine seafood dishes such as the Fried Mussels of northern Greece and Spiny Lobster Cooked with Spring Onions and Herbs from Lesvos abound, as do interesting meat preparations, including the many lamb and goat dishes of Roumeli and Quinces Stuffed with Ground Lamb from the north, as well as poultry standouts like One-Pot Chicken with Broth-Simmered Noodles and Ground Walnuts (upholding the tradition of cooking noodles in broth because water was scarce). Many dishes use common ingredients in surprising ways, like an earthy Pasta with Yogurt and Caramelized Onions from Kassos and Chard-Stuffed Turkey from Nazos. Kochilas doesn't skimp on savory pies (Fresh Cheese Pie with Fennel from Kalavyrta, Pumpkin and Carrot Pie from Cephalonia), bread (Raisin-Stuffed Lazarus Bread from Lesvos), or desserts (Pancakes with Yogurt and Currants), and she presents numerous appetizing vegetable dishes. The text sections are of uniformly high quality, with indispensable pages on regional cheeses. Kochilas writes lovingly and insightfully about her adopted country, profiling the many Greeks (mostly women) who generously shared recipes with her, and displays a deep grasp of history. (Apr.) Forecast: Kochilas's eight years of research show in the book's thoroughness. A landmark for Greek cooking in the U.S., it's a likely candidate for cookbook awards and can be confidently billed as the definitive source. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
Kochilas is the author of The Food and Wine of Greece and an acknowledged authority on Greek food. After traveling extensively throughout the country, she moved there in 1990, partly to begin research on this ambitious work, which is obviously a labor of love. She includes more than 400 recipes from all regions, starting with the Peloponnesus and the Ionian Islands, moving on to Macedonia, the islands of the Aegean, and Crete, and finishing up in the city of Athens. Many of the recipes will be unfamiliar to Americans indeed, some are unknown in Greece outside of their particular provenance. Kochilas also provides extensive historical background, cultural as well as culinary, along with detailed descriptions and explanations of ingredients, from "the last barrel fetas" to Macedonian peppers. While her book does not have quite the charm of Aglaia Kremezi's lovely, more narrowly focused The Foods of the Greek Islands (LJ 10/1/00), its scope and range of recipes make it an essential purchase. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
What People Are Saying
Nancy Harmon Jenkins
This is a splendid achievement—beautifully written, dense with information, and offered with a rare warmth and generosity of spirit.
—(Nancy Harmon Jenkins, author of The Mediterranean Diet Cookbook)
Joyce Goldstein
The Glorious Foods of Greece is plainly a labor of love and intelligence. You will be amazed by the incredible regional diversity of Greek cuisine. Diane's passion for Greek cuisine and her attention to detail make the recipes come alive with their vibrant sense of place.
—( Joyce Goldstein, cookbook author and culinary consultant)
Mort Rosenblum
Diane Kochilas sheds warm, wondrous light on the Mediterranean's best-kept culinary secret: the range and flavor of real Greek food. From the hubbub of Athens' market to old stone kitchens on forgotten islands, she lets us savor what we have been missing.
—(Mort Rosenblum, author of A Goose in Toulouse and Olives)
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