The Food of Northern Spain: Recipes from the Gastronomic Heartland of Spain

by Jenny Chandler

Spanish food has taken the culinary world by storm, and the food of northern Spain represents the best the Iberian peninsula has to offer. These regions produce wonderful raw ingredients, which the home cooks of Spain have long used to create classic dishes like Romesco and Alioli, and modern-day chefs have rediscovered in order to bring Spanish food to the forefront of the gourmet world. All the dishes here are designed for cooking in your own kitchen...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 186205679X
• ISBN13: 9781862056794
• Release Date: March 2006
• Publisher: Pavilion Books
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 2.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 9.0" x 11.0"

Customer Reviews

Cooking Pleasure

This is a small, but very choice cookbook, simply chock full of the most delicious looking recipes. It is simply perfect for cooks - at any skill level - who like to cook healthy, home-made food without spending twelve hours in the kitchen. It also has a lovely, well written guide to the rarely mentioned northern provinces of Spain - Galicia and Asturias, especially - which has now made it my ambition to visit them for myself. However, if your idea of "Spanish" cooking is Mexican or Central American, let this one alone; it is traditional European home cooking with enough of a gourmet touch that you can serve a formal dinner party but not so complicated that you cannot make it for the family. I think this is one book that everyone who likes to cook should have on their kitchen shelf.

Major Addition to Spanish Culinary Writing. Buy It.

`The Food of Northern Spain' by culinary writer, Jenny Chandler contributes much to achieving parity between writings on regional cuisines in Spain and Italy. This is such a popular genre nowadays, there have been a few less than luminary titles recently, but this one is a real winner. It will take a close look at the map of Spain to understand the region of which Senorita Chandler is writing. It is easy to think of it as only the northern Atlantic coast of Spain, west of the Pyrenees, but she is really taking the entire line, virtually all along the same meridian of latitude, from northwestern, Celtic Galacia to the very urban and modern Catalonia on the Mediterranean coast, including the landlocked Navarre and parts of Aragon. The appropriateness of this choice is clear once one has read important recent books on both the Basque and Catalan cuisines, both of which tout their subject as Spain's culinary center. Senorita Chandler makes the excellent case that this entire region, distinguished primarily by deep valleys in mountainous terrain and rough seacoasts, taken together, is the culinary heart of Spain. While this does not appear on the surface to be a very scholarly study, a la Coleman Andrews or Paula Wolfert, of this cuisine it is really much more studied and revealing of the soul of its subject than other recent oversized travelogues of Spanish cuisine. The author begins with a chapter of Background on each of the regions comprising her chosen territory. While giving us not much more than two pages per province, she manages to evoke the spirit and resources of the region as brightly and as passionately as a much longer discourse. Next, is an excellent chapter on the Storecupboard and Cellar on the principle ingredients of the regions. I am taken by the fact that she begins not with olives and olive oil, but with peppers. It is crystal clear from every book I've read on Spanish cuisine that the great variety of peppers arriving from the New World are as much an influence on the food of northern Spain as the tomato is for the cuisine of southern Italy. A bit of reflection tells me that peppers as a class are a far richer addition than tomatoes, as the range of colors, sizes, and flavors of peppers is far greater than the similar range for tomatoes. There is just so much variety you can squeeze out of a plum tomato, even if it was grown in the shadow of Vesuvius. This little essay on peppers also reveals something about Spain that I have known for years about far-flung former Spanish colonies such as the Philippines, but which never came to the fore in other books. This is the fact that to Spaniards, canned produce is just as good as fresh, it's just different, not inferior. This will become obvious to you the next time you pass the 30-foot long Goya section of your supermarket. The Goya brand is Spanish, not Mexican, as I was want to jump to before actually looking at a can of Goya beans and a bottle of highly regarded Goya olive oil.

Mouthwateringly entertaining

Jenny Chandler's style is truly unique. She combines the most enticing dishes and mouthwatering photography with a fabulously dry wit. Indulge your senses!