Nirmala Narine

My published review located on Amazon at
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0811869067

I adore food diaries and have several, thus I hoped for something along the lines of Elisabeth Luard's Classic Spanish Cooking: Recipes for Mastering the Spanish kitchen, a lovely volume full stories, notes, recipes and her own hand-drawn illustrations. That was, unfortunately, not to be.

I don't know what has happened to cookbook editors lately, but this is the second cookbook I've had in the last few months that looks and feels like it was produced as a brochure using the clip-art that comes with Microsoft Word. This book is so busy that the words and recipes simply get lost. Full of empty pages, pointless un-captioned graphics (many out of focus or with an odd gray cast) and fine black type on yellow pages (never a good combination for older eyes) Nirmala's Edible Diary: A Hungry Traveler's Cookbook with Recipes from 14 Countries sent me running for my reading glasses and a couple of aspirin. With pages bordered with a variety of colored designs (Intended to look like peasant embroidery?), headlines set in odd type - purple no less - and country names that appear every other letter in a different color, this "diary" makes one wonder if the graphic artist that produced this masterpiece wasn't having a bad acid trip that day.

If you can get around the graphics & layout, the recipes seem OK, sometimes interesting, though I do question the number of eggs in the Pate a Choux and the combinations presented in the menus for various countries seem oddly chosen & very heavy - combinations I would never in a million years choose to serve at the same meal.

One other little point. Nirmala seems to use the word "palate" quite often - something that seems a bit superscilious to me. Your "palate" is the roof of your mouth. All in all, not exactly "bad" but nothing I would rush right out to buy, one that I would put straight back on the shelf in the bookstore - and not one I would recommend. Take a look at Latin American Cooking Across the U.S.A. instead. The Tortilla Soup is the best I've ever had!… (mere)