Mediterranean Diet Cooking Books

Like armchair quarterbacks who imagine the possible plays of a football team during a televised game, the readers of Mediterranean cookbooks imagine the sights and the tastes of the region's finest fare.

Unlike the armchair quarterbacks who may never direct a team, armchair cooks usually have the option to tackle a recipe. The pleasures of the table also can be replayed with the same recipe.

Three standout cookbooks featuring Mediterranean cookery are
1) The Mediterranean Diet Cookbook: A Delicious Alternative for Lifelong Health by Nancy Harmon Jenkins

2)
Mediterranean Cooking Revised With 75 New Recipes by Paula Wolfert

3) Complete Mediterranean The Beautiful Cookbook by Joyce Goldstein and Ayla Algar.

Ms. Jenkins writes engagingly of the foods, the people and the history of the Mediterranean. Her book is nothing like a typical diet book, outlining ways to lose weight. Instead, her book explores the pleasures of the total diet and Mediterranean lifestyle.

Her anecdotes about wonderful meals created in kitchens with little more than a few dented pans encourage timid cooks.

Ms. Jenkins provides helpful guidelines for the selection and substitution of ingredients and offers recipe instructions geared to American kitchens and typical household equipment.

She writes that the best couscous, for example, is fine-grain Diafra variety from Morocco and, to her knowledge, is not imported to this country. A couscoussiere is a special two-part pot for preparing couscous.

The pot can be fabricated in American kitchens with a stockpot for the bottom and a colander that will just fit into the top. The colander should be lined with a double layer of cheesecloth to keep the grains from falling through the holes. A tight seal between the bottom and top is important to force the steam through the holes of the top and into the couscous.

Ms. Wolfert's updated collection of Mediterranean recipes emphasizes the traditional recipes of the region. When she first wrote the book in the 1970s, she worried that traditional foods were fading.

"Happily, it has turned out, I was wrong," Ms. Wolfert wrote in her introduction. "Mediterranean cooking is, I am pleased to report, very much alive. I underestimated the pull of age-old culinary traditions and longings of Mediterranean peoples to regain and recapture their identities."

"Simple authentic Mediterranean dishes are all the rage today."



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