Ethnic American Cooking

October 3, 2016
This condensed version of 2015’s two-volume Ethnic American Food Today: A Cultural Encyclopedia essentially replicates its source material while magnifying its flaws. Arranged alphabetically by country of immigrant origin
, the entries briefly survey the country, its culture, key flavors, and iconic dishes, and provide recipes exemplifying those qualities. That’s a lot to chew on, but Long offers readers only an amuse-bouche. Her dish selections (often sourced from cited third parties; many are repurposed from her previous work) are frustratingly arbitrary. African-Americans have made significant contributions to American cuisine, but merit just a single recipe (pan-roasted collard sprouts), while Croatia and the Netherlands receive three apiece. Italy is a country rich in culinary history with recipes for any given dish often varying from town to town. Here, Long limits herself to just a few paragraphs to cover the cuisine’s influence on America and just two recipes: spaghetti with anchovies and walnuts, and chicken with potatoes and peas. It adds up to a book that raises more questions than it answers. To Long’s credit, she suggests plenty of other works to follow up with should a dish or cuisine spike the reader’s interest (including Ethnic American Food Today), but the larger question of why this digest exists isn’t really answered. The book might be useful in a school or institutional context, but readers hoping for a survey of how countless cultures have influenced American cuisine will be left hungry.

October 1, 2016
Quintessentially a nation of immigrants, America owes its character as much to the diversity of its foods as to those who populate its land. Every newly arrived group brings its own foodways to America's shores, adding meats, fruits, vegetables, and spices hitherto unknown. With no access to ingredients that can't thrive in North America's climate, creative substitution became a necessity, and so dishes drifted from their originals. Here, Long inventories the different nationalities in alphabetical order and provides one or two recipes for each, typifying the kinds of foods immigrants imported. Long makes it her business to find something to illustrate just about every ethnic tradition: China, Italy, France, Germany, and even diminutive Vanuatu islands and San Marino. Exacting culinarians may balk at the authenticity of some of the recipes here, but Long has tried to reflect the challenges and realities of immigrant cooking with commonly available American supermarket meats and produce.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)