Istanbul and Beyond

Starred review from August 7, 2017
Eckhardt, creator of the blog Eating Asia, takes readers under her wing and introduces them to the wonders of Turkish cooking in this fascinating and tasty, if not especially adventurous, collection. As with Italy and China, Turkey has a varied landscape that greatly impacts food production. Each region has a deep-rooted history that results in a national cuisine with a wide array of dishes with vastly different ingredients. Despite this, Eckhardt provides a surprisingly familiar list of Turkish pantry staples including red pepper flakes, corn, and herbs such as dill, mint, and thyme. This familiarity carries over to her recipes, such as eggs poached in chunky tomato and pepper sauce, red lentil soup with chile and mint, and tomato and white bean stew. Dishes are grouped by region, highlighting the best authentic cuisine each has to offer. Yeast bread stuffed with Swiss chard and herbs from the Black Sea region, handkerchief noodles with blue cheese and butter from the northeast, and meatballs in tomato sauce with pumpkin and spice butter from Hakkâri are just a few of the mouth-watering delicacies on offer. This collection will delight and inspire home cooks who are unfamiliar with the region’s food but are looking to broaden their culinary horizons. Agent: Janis Donnaud, Janis Donnaud & Assoc.

Starred review from August 1, 2017

During regular travels to Turkey, journalist Eckhardt and her photographer husband, Hagerman, encountered a wealth of regional cuisines that left a lasting impression. Their exquisite cookbook richly captures the more than 15,000 miles they journeyed, bringing together unexpected and flavorful dishes for breakfasts, appetizers, salads, mains, pickles, beverages, and much more. Ordered by region, beginning with Istanbul and ending with North Central Anatolia, this book includes recipes by category to help readers quickly locate specific dishes. All of the recipes are easily reproduced at home, often with conventional ingredients, and include suggestions for sources and substitutions for spices and pantry items that are harder to find. VERDICT Get ready to savor this evocative collection, which will seduce fans of food/travel titles such as Naomi Duguid's Taste of Persia or Caroline Eden and Eleanor Ford's Samarkand.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2017
Visitors to Istanbul have long marveled over the sophistication and sheer delights of Turkish cuisine, but the nation's iconic foods haven't spread their influence as far across the world as might be expected. Eckhardt intends to remedy this with a comprehensive and instructive new cookbook exploring the full range of Turkish cooking beyond Istanbul's limits. For those with limited experience with Turkish eats, Eckhardt provides a very useful survey of common Turkish ingredients, pointing out the cuisine's most important flavors: parsley, tomato paste, dried chiles, and a rainbow of fragrant herbs and spices. For rarer items, she offers possible substitutions. Wheat doughs come in all guises, from super-thin pastry sheets to noodles and yeast breads, both savory and sweet. Adept bakers may expand their repertoire with any of a number of inspirations deriving from Anatolian, Kurdish, Armenian, and Syrian sources. As if the recipes weren't attractive enough, full-color photographs further push readers into the kitchen.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)