Books by Nancy Harmon Jenkins
The Essential Mediterranean: How Regional Cooks Transform Key Ingredients into the World's Favorite Cuisines
With The Essential Mediterranean, Nancy Harmon Jenkins continues her lifelong exploration of Mediterranean food -- how it is grown, prepared, and shared around the table. In her latest book, Ms. Jenkins introduces cooks and readers to a cluster of core ingredients and foodways that are fundamental to all of the Mediterranean's diverse cuisines. She shows how the Mediterranean attitude toward food -- a combination of respect, integrity, enthusiasm, and sheer joy -- can be cultivated across the Atlantic.
In twelve informative and captivating chapters, the author focuses on the core ingredients common to the diverse cuisines of the region: salt, wine and vinegar, pasta and couscous, bread, olive oil, Old World legumes, New World peppers and tomatoes, dairy products, the family pig, and the resources of the sea. In each chapter she travels to a different corner of the Inner Sea to describe how and why these essential ingredients are obtained, what determines their quality, and where they fit in local cuisines.
Each chapter draws on history and ethnography as much as on the lives of Mediterranean people today. Readers will delight in Majid Mahjoub, the colorful Tunisian "Shakespeare of olive oil," and commiserate with Provencal cheese maker Yves van Weddingen as he struggles to maintain his standards in the face of bureaucratic demands. Home cooks will garner a new appreciation of high-quality Spanish jamon de bellota as they follow the Trigo family through the annual winter ritual of transforming the family pig into hams and sausages.
More than 170 contemporary, accessible recipes, simple to reproduce at home, bring the foods and the regions alive, while additional chapters include basic procedures and staples, as well as a helpful guide to ingredient sources.
The Essential Mediterranean gets to the heart of this world, celebrating its diverse food cultures and the shared ingredients that are the essence of these remarkable cuisines.
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Cucina del Sole: A Celebration of Southern Italian Cooking
Nancy Harmon Jenkins has lived in Italy for fifteen years and describes this wonderful region from Naples to the toe of Italy that is still unspoiled by tourism with its own rich culinary traditions quite different from Tuscany and Northern Italy. In addition to a wealth of recipes, the book gives capsule portraits of local features: a fish market, an olive oil press, a bakery, a shepherd cheese–maker. Headnotes describe local folklore and traditions and what makes the food of Southern Italy a world on its own. Included are recipes for focaccias, pizzas and savory pies; soups and minestre; sauces for pasta; pasta, beans, rice, and other grains; fish and seafood; meat and poultry; vegetables; salads; and desserts.
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The Four Seasons of Pasta
by Nancy Harmon Jenkins, Sara Jenkins
Acclaimed food writer Nancy Jenkins, teams up with her master chef daughter Sara with a unique around-the-seasons cookbook devoted to simple, everyday pasta recipes
There are few ingredients in a cook’s pantry that beat out pasta—for tastiness, for ease of preparation, for versatility, and for sheer delight. It’s irresistible to all and perfect for every occasion. In The Four Seasons of Pasta, Sara Jenkins and Nancy Harmon Jenkins celebrate the Italian native that has become a beloved American staple.
Jenkins and her mom draw on their own background in Italy, where they’ve lived, cooked, studied, and worked in Rome and Florence, and on a Tuscan olive farm for many years. Today, Sara is a highly accomplished chef and owner of Porsena and Porchetta, two restaurants in New York’s East Village while Nancy is a nationally known food journalist and authority on the Mediterranean diet, with a number of prominent cookbooks to her credit (including The New Mediterranean Diet Cookbook and Flavors of Tuscany).
The Four Seasons of Pasta brings together more than 120 recipes focused on seasonal ingredients from supermarkets and farmstands across America, from the gamey meat ragus, chestnuts, and brilliant pumpkins in autumn to summer’s explosion of tomatoes, eggplant, and peppers. Nancy and Sara introduce readers to quick-and-easy weeknight dishes as well as more ambitious affairs while four-color photography brings the recipes vividly to life. Along the way, the two cooks delve into how to cook, sauce, and present pasta, how to make it by hand, and pasta’s significant place in a healthy modern diet.
The Four Seasons of Pasta is an invaluable tool for home cooks seeking to enjoy the quintessential food that’s in their pantry all year-round.
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