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Lisa
Messinger's
Cookbook Corner
30
Secrets of the World's Healthiest Cuisines: Global Eating Tips and
Recipes from China, France, Japan, the Mediterranean, Africa, and
Scandinavia
by
Steven Jonas, MD, and Sandra J. Gordon (John Wiley & Sons)
  You
probably have sporadically read the tidbits in the newspaper or
heard about them on the evening news: Japanese women have drastically
lower rates of breast cancer than their Western counterparts; French
wine drinkers suffer far less heart disease; Greeks who virtually
bathe their food in olive oil are healthier in every respect—less
cancer, high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes—than those
who live in the United States, where cases of all those ailments
are skyrocketing.
Steven
Jonas, MD, and Sandra J. Gordon have done more than read those tidbits;
they have put them to the test in the kitchen. 30 Secrets of
the World's Healthiest Cuisines is a book that captures not
just one cuisine and its nutritional strengths, but a whole world
of possibly life-lengthening tips and recipes.
Full
chapters cover the Mediterranean, France, China, Japan, Scandinavia
and Western Africa and delineate the potency of their diets. Foods
relied upon in Western Africa (sweet potatoes, the starchy tuber
cassava, peanuts and vegetable stews), for instance, are looked
at specifically regarding possible cancer preventive qualities as
is the Scandinavians' taste for dairy (a switch in recent years
to lower fat varieties has translated into verifiable health improvements)
and whole grains.
Needless
to say, this isn't a book for those who like to read recipes and
nothing more. This filling meal consists of plenty of pages regarding
the latest health studies and how they can positively influence
your habits.
Never
have health studies yielded such tasty results. You can start a
meal with curry corn bisque (a hybrid of recipes from France and
Japan) that is ingeniously flavored with not only curry powder,
but grated raw peeled ginger (a nutritional powerhouse), cayenne
pepper and expertly thickened with tofu (which has no flavor of
its own, a la flour or cornstarch) that's been made smooth in a
food processor. Your main course might be mu shu chicken with pancakes
(China), domodah (West African groundnut chicken stew), Sicilian
lemon chicken or Swedish cheese-stuffed chicken.
For
dessert, try a Mediterranean cake with cinnamon syrup, orange poppy
seed biscotti (Italy) or citrus-berry parfait (France) that, like
the aforementioned soup, is thickened with blended tofu.
Besides
not being bored on this plan, you won't get taxed, either: The recipes
are exceptionally concise, easy and well written and quite a few
complete menus (based on 1,500- and 2,000-calorie meal plans) are
suggested. Many of the book's recipes are much shorter than the
ones that follow, but these are exceptionally delicious and feature
nutritionally powerful ingredients you are unlikely to find in such
combinations elsewhere.
RECIPES
—Curry
Corn Bisque
—Domodah (West African Groundnut
Chicken Stew)
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