Ethnic American Cooking - by Lucy M Long (Hardcover)

About the Book

Ethnic American Cooking: Recipes for Living in a New World is much more than a cookbook. It contains recipes from almost every nationality or ethnicity residing in the US and includes a brief introduction to understanding how those recipes represent that group's food culture.

Book Synopsis

Ethnic American Cooking: Recipes for Living in a New World is much more than a cookbook. It contains recipes from almost every nationality or ethnicity residing in the US and includes a brief introduction to understanding how those recipes represent that group's food culture.

Review Quotes

[Ethnic American Cooking is] about the recipes. And part of the fun is armchair quibbling over what the representative dishes are.

Lucy M. Long's Ethnic American Cooking: Recipes for Living in a New World brings together a world of tastes for readers who don't need to leave home. A wonderful collection of dishes that are not usually thought of as American, Ethnic American Cooking provides an introduction to a wide range of national cuisines at the same time it reveals the creative ways these recipes are adapted to the American context.

Quintessentially a nation of immigrants, America owes its character as much to the diversity of its foods as to those who populate its land. Every newly arrived group brings its own foodways to America's shores, adding meats, fruits, vegetables, and spices hitherto unknown. With no access to ingredients that can't thrive in North America's climate, creative substitution became a necessity, and so dishes drifted from their originals. Here, Long inventories the different nationalities in alphabetical order and provides one or two recipes for each, typifying the kinds of foods immigrants imported. Long makes it her business to find something to illustrate just about every ethnic tradition: China, Italy, France, Germany, and even diminutive Vanuatu islands and San Marino.... Long has tried to reflect the challenges and realities of immigrant cooking with commonly available American supermarket meats and produce.

Scholars of American foodways, take note. Ethnic American Cooking is a rich source of primary material, recipes redolent of the lives and cultures of the many people from around the world who call America their home, and as an added bonus, it offers you a wonderful source of inspiration for your own kitchens.

The varied voices, ingredient flexibility, and very occasional uncertainty make the cookbook (and the encyclopedia) feel human and alive--like a tour through someone else's recipe box. Many of these recipes come from home cooks, and the intimacy and informality of sharing family recipes separates these hybrid books--scholarly and practical, theoretical and hands-on--from the burgeoning commercial cookbook industry.

This volume is based on a superb idea, that of providing a practical demonstration--through recipes--of the widely varied foodways of scores of ethnic groups in the U.S. Each entry is preceded by a brief introduction to that ethnicity and is followed by reference to more detailed information in Lucy Long's encyclopedic Ethnic American Food Today. I highly recommend Ethnic American Cooking. Those wishing to discover the richness of food traditions in contemporary America and expand their culinary repertoire will find Ethnic American Cooking a unique and valuable resource, one they will use for years to come.

About the Author

Lucy Long, is a folklorist and founder and director of the Center for Food and Culture, Bowling Green, OH. She has published extensively on cultural aspects of food and foodways, including the books Culinary Tourism (2004) and Regional American Food Culture (2009), and has produced documentary videos, museum exhibits, and educational programs and materials on that subject. She is an adjunct assistant professor at Bowling Green State University, where she has taught food studies courses since 1998 in departments of Popular Culture, American Culture Studies, International Studies, and Tourism. She is the editor of Ethnic American Food Today: A Cultural Encyclopedia (Rowman, 2015): on which this volume is based.