Synopsis
Drawing on both American and Japanese dietary guidelines, Chef Jerome gives us ten culinary principles that provide a map for healthy, ecologically aware cooking and eating. To create a balanced diet, he suggests we eat two slices of bread with every meal and two servings of cereals or grains, three or four different vegetables, and two fruits every day. He recommends modest amounts of animal protein, little or no fat or salt, and, whenever possible, foods with minimal or no chemical additives. He wants us to think seasonally when we buy food and to understand the food we buy. And, equally important, he urges us to make every meal a celebration, or, as the Japanese say, to treasure home cooking and make all our activities pertaining to food and eating pleasurable ones.
This is a tall order in our hurry-up society, but Chef Jerome makes a good case for this old yet new way of thinking, and then makes it easy for us by giving us unusually creative recipes so that we can enjoy a rich variety of good-tasting, healthful food. He enlarges our repertoire of vegetables, beans, and grains with recipes like Emerald Spinach with Hidden Herbs, Rice with Black-eyed Peas and Tomatoes, and Whole Wheat Couscous with Wild Mushrooms. He offers Brown Basmati Rice with Cinnamon Sugar or Bread Pudding with Currants for breakfast and a variety of complex, satisfying soups for all times of the day. He extols the virtues of making bread, and the recipes in the bread chapter constitute a minicourse in bread making. There are deeply flavorful recipes for meat dishes and desserts - to be enjoyed in moderation.
Reviews
In a compelling introductory essay, Jerome charts the metamorphosis in American cuisine from the vegetarian counterculture movement of the '60s to the popular appeal of natural and healthy, environmentally safe food products of today. He presents ten straightforward, sensible culinary guidelines for a wholesome diet and way of life, stressing the need to eat well-balanced meals high in carbohydrates and low in fat, to think seasonally, and to eat and shop with respect for the environment. Such ideas are hardly revolutionary, but Jerome does present a wonderful assortment of recipes reduced in fat and salt and abundant in flavor, texture and color. The most innovative aspect is that fish and meat dishes, wedged between the breads and relishes in the back of the book, are treated as condiments, which challenges their traditional role as main fare. A comprehensive selection of breakfast foods, soups, jams and fruit butters, in addition to a plethora of exotic grain and legume vegetable dishes and desserts--saffron pasta with Asian pesto, golden beet salad, flageolets in rosemary cream, pink cranshaw sorbet, peach truffles--make this an enjoyable new collection for the health-conscious cook of the '90s.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Jerome, author of The Good Health Microwave Cookbook ( LJ 11/15/90), now focuses on "lean and green eating"--a light and healthy diet that is also ecologically sound. His recipes are fine--fairly sophisticated but simple and mostly uncomplicated, with lots of vegetables, grains, and pastas, although this is not a vegetarian cookbook (a chapter with the unexciting title "Animal Protein" includes ten meat or fish entrees). Unfortunately, the recipes are saddled with a text that offers a rather glib explanation of the 1960s counterculture and its culinary heritage, with too much New Age-speak (e.g., "Washing strawberries... is a chance to communicate spiritually, perhaps even meditatively, with the strawberries and yourself"). Lorna Sass's vegan cookbook Recipes from an Ecological Kitchen ( LJ 6/16/92) provides a better introduction to a "green" diet. Buy Jerome's book for its interesting recipes.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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