Seductions Of Rice - Hardcover

Alford, Jeffrey; Duguid, Naomi

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679309322 ISBN 13: 9780679309321

Publisher: Random House Canada, 1998

Synopsis

With a depth of passion and experience, and an ability to embrace and convey richness of place and taste, the authors of the groundbreaking Flatbreads and Flavors and the later award-winning Hot Sour Salty Sweet embarked on a far-reaching excursion to find the world's most essential and satisfying food. Along the way, they experienced firsthand dozens of varieties of rice, offering unimaginable subtleties of taste, as well as a staggering array of foods to accompany them, all providing a simple way to get flavor and variety on the table.

Seductions of Rice is the glorious result: two hundred easy-to-prepare dishes from the world's great rice cuisines, illuminated by stories, insights, and more than two hundred photographs of people, places, and wonderful food. Cherished dishes--Chinese stir-frys, Spanish paellas, Japanese sushi, Indian thorans, Thai salads, Turkish pilafs, Italian risottos--are shared not just as recipes, but as time-honored traditions.

Seductions of Rice will change the way we eat, the way we prepare and appreciate our food. It's as easy as putting a pot of rice on to cook!

About this title

Review

Chinese stir-frys, Spanish paellas, Japanese sushi, Indian thorans, Thai salads, Turkish pilafs, Italian risottos, Senegalese yassas, American gumbos: if rice isn't the heart and soul of all these diverse dishes, rice can be found piled right there at the side of the plate, or in a bowl. To say that Alford and Duguid, authors of the award-winning Flatbreads and Flavors, deliver the world of rice is much too simple an understatement. Your days of buying one rice to serve all purposes will end with even a cursory reading of this lovely book.

The authors are photographers as well as writers, but their greatest skill may be to travel the world at the level of the culture they visit. They seem able to drop away from Western culture and hunker right down with rice vendor or cook, no matter where.

Seductions of Rice opens with all the basics of rice, everything a reader would want to know and then some. Then on to the cultures of rice: Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Indian, Central Asian, Mediterranean, Senegalese, and North American. Recipes either made from rice or to accompany rice range from Chinese Congee to Thai Green Papaya Salad to Japanese Quick Morning Miso Soup to South Indian Lentil Stew to Cuban Black Beans to Mexican Green Rice.

And in between? The authors fill in all the space between these diverse grains of rice with traveler's tales from the road. It is a luxurious book, a delicious book, a ripe combination of travel and taste. You leave off thinking that the world must be the shape of a rice ball. --Schuyler Ingle

From the Back Cover

A New Way to Eat - The Rice Way

After leafing through these pages, it seems inconceivable that we haven't been eating this way--the rice way--all our lives. Here is a stunning book that takes us on an extraordinary adventure, and on the way it just may change forever--happily and healthily--the way we cook.

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House Canada
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0679309322
• ISBN 13: 9780679309321
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 474