Also recommended: "Recipes and Remembrances from an Eastern Mediterranean Kitchen," by Sonia Uvezian. This is by far the best volume in its subject area and one of the greatest ethnic cookbooks ever written, offering fascinating text and hundreds of splendid recipes. The illuminating essays on the region's flatbreads as well as recipes for flavor-packed dishes that utilize them are reason enough to purchase this book.

27 of 30 found the following review helpful:


Superb Treatment of a Broad Culinary Topic. Buy It!  Apr 01, 2006 By B. Marold "Bruce W. Marold"
`Flatbreads & flavors, A Baker's Atlas' is Canadian culinary photographer / writers' pair Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid's second book, which is easily more useful to the average foodie and reader than their last two expensive culinary travelogues, `Mangoes & Curry Leaves' and `Hot Sour Salty Sweet'. While this book covers a broad geographical range, like the `big' books, it maintains its high level of quality and focus by concentrating exclusively on the subject of flatbreads and dishes that are most commonly served with these flatbreads in their `natural habitat'.

While Alford and Duguid seem to have inherited the style of the great culinary travelogue, `Honey from a Weed' by Patience Gray, they have their own twists on this style which makes it all their own. One difference is that while Gray does a fair amount of reflection on the whys of local techniques, her observations are not systematic. They are more in the line of archeological observations. Since Alford and Duguid in this book, are dealing with the single technique of baking flatbreads, this focus give them the opportunity to give us an excellent tutorial on bread baking technique, including the use of modern appliances in the making of traditional flatbread recipes.

The authors take their `Atlas' approach seriously, as each chapter addresses a particular geographical region and opens with a map locating the center of traditional production for each type of bread. The eight regions are:

Central Asia, primarily Iran, the `...stans', and Tibet with lots of yoghurt and kebabs.

China, Vietnam, and Malaysia with dipping sauces, pancakes, and roll-ups.

India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka with chutneys, curries, and lentils galore.

Eastern Mediterranean, or `flatbread central' with pitas, matzos, Bulgar wheat, and dips and wraps.

Morocco, Tunisia, and Ethiopia, with mostly accompanying dishes.

Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, the home of Lavosh

Europe, from Italian pizza to Scottish oatcakes

North America with tortillas, crackers, and salsas.

While this would seem to be a rich subject, the authors don't spend much time reflecting on why flatbreads are so important in some parts of the world and less important in others. In Asia, it seems that it is the only kind of bread they make, while in Europe, it's definitely a sidelight. I hypothesize that flatbreads are important where there fuel for ovens is scarce and the native peoples are or were at one time primarily nomadic.

It is just a bit surprising to see how many different bread recipes use yeast. One would think yeast requires a nearby brewing industry, but natural sourdough type yeast is free for the asking and a lot easier to manage on the road than chemical leaveners, when the nearest 7 - 11 is 7000 miles away. But, all the recipes have been modernized and none actually use natural sourdough yeasts. All yeast doughs are made with `active dry yeast', the kind you have to bloom in warm water, but which will keep for years in their little foil packets. The other side of the coin is that there are a fair number or yeastless recipes, especially India's skillet breads, where the leavening is the action of heat and water in the dough, very much like unleavened matzos, except that matzos is made in an oven. So, if you can't tolerate yeast and you are tired of buttermilk biscuits and Irish soda bread, this book may be a great ticket to enriching your range of tolerated breads.

One thing this book does not do is be a complete source on those flatbreads which are so dear to our French / Spanish / Italian backgrounds. If your primary interest is with Pizza, go to Peter Reinhart's `American Pie' or some other treatise on pizza by your favorite Italian cookbook author. If your primary interest is in tortillas, get Diana Kennedy's `From My Mexican Kitchen'. But, if you like these things and want to find the their flatbread cousins, this is your book.

This book is simply all around excellent, and certainly deserves its James Beard Cookbook award. It makes me wish Alford and Duguid would stick to their single subject surveys instead of boosting their photographs business with the richly pictured , `Mangoes & Curry Leaves' and `Hot Sour Salty Sweet'. Their other books on rice and home baking are similarly delightful and should be in every foodie's library.

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