All the recipes I've tried from this so far have worked. I don't know how to keep burnt flour off an un-oiled griddle, though.
The flatbreads are traditional from around the world; yeasted or not, based on wheat, corn, rye; some with inclusions, some extremely plain. The "flavors" are the food that the authors were offered with the breads. It's mostly simple, nourishing, one-pot, everyday family food. (Useful! And classic: remember, if only from Courtesans and Fishcakes, the ancient division of food into sitos and opson.)
The book's layout doesn't live up to the practicality of the recipes. Cross-references are often given without page numbers, so that comparing similar recipes requires more thumbs than I have, or a litter of bookmarks. Worse, the bread recipes usually cross a page-turn. This is especially annoying when my hands are sticky with bread-dough, which will glue the pages together if it doesn't surrender them to insects. It isn't logically necessary, because most of the recipes will fit on a two-page spread and the long ones often have logical breaks ("set to rise overnight"). It probably isn't even necessary to preserve the book's length, because there's a lot of travelogue material among the recipes, and no reason for that material not to jump pages where needed.
Cookbooks, especially pretty ones with wide margins and sidebars and autobiographical material, have this counterproductive pretty-printing far too often. I suspect there's a graphic-design rule, perhaps calcified in some otherwise-useful software, encouraging layouts to always put a heading on the right-hand page. It might look better with lorem ipsum dolor
but it divorces the form of this text from its function. Fie.
The autobiographical-anthropological stuff in this particular book is okay; it's maybe surprising in hindsight that everywhere was lovely and unique and full of friendly home cooks, but I'm happy to believe that the world is like that for good travelers.
One of the anecdotes might even be useful to historians; while discussing the many flatbreads of the Middle East, they pass on a archaeologist's tale of having failed to describe a tasty, fluffy bread to the camp cook in a region that mostly ate tough bread made of the same ingredients. A decade after he left, the archaeologist got to go back to the region, and found that practically everyone was eating a novel and fluffy bread. When he asked where it came from, his old cook looked at him oddly and explained that it was the bread he had asked for a decade ago. This was a salutary warning for the archaologist, who was professionally inclined to assume that foodways don't change that quickly, and certainly not on mere rumor. (p. 192)
I was in a cafeteria surrounded by day-camp kids earlier this summer, trying to ignore the furor, when it slowly became apparent that the table-pounding had rhythm and purpose. I even knew the tune; it was a simplified version of a song, or game, or something like, that I was lucky enough to learn from and a friend years ago in the Allegro café. I asked whether there was a circle version, and where the kids had learned it. There is a circle version, usually played with increasing speed as I remember (but you need a larger table than a cafeteria had). None of the kids knew where it came from, but all of them, and their deafened adult minders all the more, agreed that every children's camp in the state - maybe the country - maybe the world - has been playing it obsessively all summer. The adults didn't remember it from any previous summer.
Now, Artis the Spoonman is such a nexus that this could have happened a lot of ways. I don't even remember if he composed it or found it. He's been around the world with rhythm and string and has performed with someone famous from about every category of music. And who knows where the fad will go? although after playing it all summer for a year, I doubt any of those kids will forget the rhythm, it's a powerful earworm.
I wonder where the words will come from.
ISBN: 0668114113
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