The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen

Recipes for the Passionate Cook
by Paula Wolfert

Paula Wolfert clearly loves the Mediterranean—especially the food and cooking. However, the "friendly but voluptuous eating experiences" she has written about in six previous books can be elusive. Thus, she wrote The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen: Recipes for the Passionate Cook. This is her (successful) "attempt to recapture the feeling of that lifestyle, offering recipes to the home cook whereby she or he may find a measure of contentment in preparing a fine dish, then serving it to family and friends."

At first glance, one might surmise that "slow," in this case, has something to do with the Slow Food movement—the group dedicated to many noble causes including "slow careful cooking and slow eating." Wolfert, indeed, tips her hat to Slow Food, but her book is respectfully independent and considers the word "slow" in every culinary sense. "The simple act of salting meat," and letting it age a bit is slow. So is combining ingredients beforehand to let the flavors blend: brining and marinating, pickling, or curing. Resting food after it has been cooked is slow, too.

How do you pick a few good things to try in a book when everything is stunning? How do you choose between Pot-Roasted Pork Loin with Fall Fruits or Chicken Smothered in Sweet Onion Cream with Country Ham? Listen to this: the pork is brined for a few days, oven-roasted and then rested for two hours. Then it's briefly cooked in a syrupy blend of dried fruits, walnuts, sweet wine and spices before a final splash of fruit-flavored vinegar. The pork dish comes from northern Greece. The chicken, from southwest France, gets its character from mountains of sweet onions, Armagnac and Bayonne ham.

To ease the decision-making, we created a big, brilliant menu by picking one dish at random from each section. To start, imagine Chestnuts Roasted on a Bed of Fennel followed by Tunisian Chickpea Salad marinated with cumin, harissa and garlic. Then a creamy Chilled Green Pea and Borage Soup.

For main dishes, a Sicilian-rooted Fresh Tuna with Green Olives, Capers, Celery and Mint, and Double-Cooked Red Chicken Marrakech-Style. Here, whole chickens are rubbed with a saffron-cilantro garlic paste and then cooked with sweet paprika, cumin and onion. For the finish, they are rubbed with spiced chicken fat and then broiled. Corsican Brined Pork Chops are served in a rich tomato sauce spiked with orange juice, olives and fresh herbs. Slow-Baked Treviso-Style Radicchio is first quickly fried, then baked, then splashed with good balsamic vinegar.

One dessert, however, was not enough. And so, we happily picked an alluring Fig, Fennel, and Lemon Tart, then Sweet Couscous with Fresh Pomegranates. Melted butter orange flower water, pistachios, cinnamon. Life doesn't get much better.

The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen is not complicated; in fact it's friendly and approachable. And like a good cooking book it's tested, detailed and easy-to-follow, with a useful appendix. Yet this is also a book to linger over and to savor—there is simply no sense in rushing one of Wolfert's 150-plus dishes when she brings her recipes to life with vignettes of her Mediterranean, or interesting comments. Whether she is discussing tagine pots or describing a meal she ate in a small town on the Turkish-Syrian border, Wolfert's words are purposeful. It's a pleasure to take this journey because you know she wants your company.

RECIPE: CHILLED GREEN PEA AND BORAGE SOUP

Reviewed by Kevin Schoeler

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