Synopses & Reviews
Home baking may be a humble art, but its roots are deeply planted. On an island in Sweden a grandmother teaches her granddaughter how to make
slagbrot, a velvety rye bread, just as she was taught to make it by her grandmother many years before. In Portugal, village women meet once each week to bake at a community oven; while the large stone oven heats up, children come running for sweet, sugary flatbreads made specially for them. In Toronto, Naomi makes her grandmother's recipe for treacle tart and Jeffrey makes the truck-stop cinnamon buns he and his father loved.
From savory pies to sweet buns, from crusty loaves to birthday cake, from old-world apple pie to peanut cookies to custard tarts, these recipes capture the age-old rhythm of turning simple ingredients into something wonderful to eat. HomeBaking rekindles the simple pleasure of working with your hands to feed your family. And it ratchets down the competitive demands we place on ourselves as home cooks. Because in striving for professional results we lose touch with the pleasures of the process, with the homey and imperfect, with the satisfaction of knowing that you can, as a matter of course, prepare something lovely and delicious, and always have a full cookie jar or some homemade cake on hand to offer.
Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid collected the recipes in HomeBaking at their source, from farmhouse kitchens in northern France to bazaars in Fez. They traveled tens of thousands of miles, to six continents, in search of everyday gems such as Taipei Coconut Buns, Welsh Cakes, Moroccan Biscotti, and Tibetan Overnight Skillet Breads. They tasted, interpreted, photographed and captured not just the recipes, but the people who made them as well. Then they took these spot-on flavors of far away and put them side by side with cherished recipes from friends and family closer to home. The result is a collection of treasures: cherry strudel from Hungary, stollen from Germany, bread pudding from Vietnam, anise crackers from Barcelona. More than two hundred recipes that resonate with the joys and flavors of everyday baking at home and around the world.
Inexperienced home bakers can confidently pass through the kitchen doors armed with Naomi and Jeffrey's calming and easy-to-follow recipes. A relaxed, easy-handed approach to baking is, they insist, as much a part of home baking traditions as are the recipes themselves. In fact it's often the last-minute recipes--semonlina crackers, a free-form fruit galette, or a banana-coconut loaf--that offer the most unexpected delights. Although many of the sweets and savories included here are the products of age-old oral traditions, the recipes themselves have been carefully developed and tested, designed for the home baker in a home kitchen.
Like the authors' previous books, HomeBaking offers a glorious combination of travel and great tastes, with recipes rich in anecdote, insightful photographs, and an inviting text that explores the diverse baking traditions of the people who share our world. This is a book to have in the kitchen and then again by your bed at night, to revisit over and over.
Synopsis
For their new book, authors Jeffery Alford and Naomi Duguid traveled tens of thousands of miles, to six continents, in search of everyday gems like Taipei Coconut Buns, Welsh Cakes, Moroccan Biscotti, and Tibetan Overnight Skillet Breads. All the while they tested, tasted, interpreted, and recorded the stories behind them, capturing the moments in photography and prose. Then they brought them all back home and put them side by side with Naomi's grandmother's treacle tart, the cinnamon buns Jeffrey grew up with, and many more such treasures. The result is a collection of more than two hundred recipes that resonate with the joys and tastes of the everyday around the globe.
Synopsis
This is far from an ordinary baking book. It is rich with people, places, and stories, and filled with utterly delicious recipes for sweet and savory gems that say welcome in dozens of languages. Let the husband-and-wife team of Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid reacquaint you with the timeless pleasure of turning simple ingredients into something wonderful to eat.
About the Author
Jeffrey Alford is the author, along with Naomi Duguid, of six award-winning books on food and travel: Flatbreads & Flavors, HomeBaking, Seductions of Rice, Hot Sour Salty Sweet, Mangoes and Curry Leaves, and Beyond the Great Wall. In stories, recipes, and photographs, the books explore daily home-cooked foods in their cultural context.
Alford now lives in northeastern Thailand, just near the Cambodian border. He plants rice in May each year, and harvests by hand in late November. He writes, gardens, grows orchids, and cooks, and he's learned to love the taste of red ant eggs, crickets, grasshoppers, and leguminous tree leaves. Nowadays, Jeffrey seldom photographs a person he doesn't know.Naomi Duguid is the author, along with Jeffrey Alford, of six award-winning books on food and travel: Flatbreads & Flavors, HomeBaking, Seductions of Rice, Hot Sour Salty Sweet, Mangoes and Curry Leaves, and Beyond the Great Wall. In stories, recipes, and photographs, the books explore daily home-cooked foods in their cultural context. Her newest book, Pinch of Turmeric, Squeeze of Lime, is a collection of recipes and travel tales from Burma.
Naomi Duguid, traveler, writer, photographer, is often described as a culinary anthropologist. She is a contributing editor of Saveur