World Food Cafe vegetarian bible : over 200 recipes from around the world

680 Pages·2014·57.61 MB·English

by  Caldicott

WORLD FOOD CAFE VEGETARIAN
BIBLE
OVER 200 RECIPES
FROM AROUND THE WORLD
CHRIS AND CAROLYN CALDICOTT
Contents
Introduction
North Africa & Arabia
Morocco
Tunisia
Egypt, Jordan & The Levant
Turkey
Oman
West & East Africa
Mali
Ethiopia
Kenya
Tanzania
Mozambique
The Indian Ocean
The Seychelles & Maldives
Sri Lanka
India
Pakistan & Nepal
Southeast Asia
Burma
China
Laos
Cambodia
Thailand
Malaysia & Indonesia
The Strait of Malacca
French Polynesia
Central & Southern America
Mexico
Guatemala & Belize
Brazil
Bolivia
Peru
Ecuador
Costa Rica
Caribbean
Jamaica
Anguilla
Nevis
Cuba
Puddings
Index
View from Anguilla in the Caribbean
fruit stall in Rajasthan, India
sherbet stall in Hyderabad India
INTRODUCTION
The freshly washed front doorstep of a house in Orissa in eastern India
Ten years of travelling the world in search of images and stories as a freelance
photojournalist and as the Expedition Photographer-in-Residence at London’s
Royal Geographical Society have given me a wealth of memorable experiences.
Not the least of these have involved the diverse and delicious meals I have been
privileged to eat in generous people’s homes and remote expedition camps, at
simple street stalls and fashionable restaurants, and in dozens of countries. I
started to collect recipes whenever possible, in the hope of being able to
reproduce the best at home.
In 1989 I met Carolyn, already an accomplished cook, who similarly found
discovering and eating exotic foods one of the greatest pleasures of travel. We
began travelling together, visiting Africa, the Middle East, the Indian
subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and Central and South America, accumulating
ideas for globally inspired recipes with the aim of one day opening a restaurant
in which we could serve all our favourite dishes from around the world. Some of
the recipes we gathered from people we met along the way who were kind
enough to invite us into their homes to eat or stay with them, others are
enough to invite us into their homes to eat or stay with them, others are
traditional dishes of specific regions. Some have been worked out by observing
the skills of speedy chefs in busy pavement cafés on crowded city streets, still
others patiently demonstrated by local people in jungles and deserts and on
mountains – some of the world’s remote places, where with so few distractions,
food, especially the evening meal, is a very necessary pleasure.
As both Carolyn and I travelled as vegetarians we were used to the challenge
of finding good things to eat in places where the traditional cuisine lends itself
more naturally to meat or seafood. Although this is rarely a serious problem,
there have been times when we felt we were missing out on some exciting dishes
simply because they were never made meatless. In such cases we adapted the
traditional recipe, replacing the meat or fish with suitable alternatives to produce
vegetarian versions just as tasty, with all the flavours and tastes so evocative of
distant lands.
In 1991 we opened the World Food Café in London. The opportunity came
when our friend and co-founder Nicholas Sanders offered us a 56 square metre
(600 sq ft) room on the first floor of a building he was restoring in Neal’s Yard
in Covent Garden. The building had previously been used as an animation studio
by the Monty Python comedy team before being burnt to the ground in an
accidental fire. Nicholas was in the process of rebuilding it in its original exterior
style, and filling it with new businesses. Our space had no plumbing, electricity
or gas – not even a floor: just four walls and three wonderful huge windows
opening out on to the tree-filled peace of Neal’s Yard. We wanted the café to
retain this bright, open character, to provide an appealing place where we could
serve meals made up from a variety of dishes from the countries we had visited.
The café was also a perfect venue to exhibit photographs taken on each trip, and
to play compilations of music originating from as many countries as the food.
The idea of cooking in faraway places food that is just like the food people
eat at home, and flying ingredients thousands of miles to achieve it, might seem
to rob travel of one of its greatest pleasures, the excitement of discovering new
cuisines; there is something strange about eating a meal of Italian pasta in the
Maldives, or a Thai curry in the Caribbean. Yet most of us enjoy eating such
dishes in our own cities without a second thought.
For centuries, all over the world local cuisines have been constantly changing.
Only 500 years ago Europeans had never tasted tomatoes, potatoes, peppers,
avocados or chocolate, no one in Asia had ever spiced their food with chilli, no
African had grown a field of maize and not a single dish in the Americas had
been garnished with coriander or spiced with pepper. So growing rocket in
northern Kenya, organic lemon grass in Belize or vines in India is really just an
inevitable consequence of ingredients and tastes migrating. Tourism may be the
inevitable consequence of ingredients and tastes migrating. Tourism may be the
initial impetus that creates a demand for previously unavailable commodities,
but in time, some of these will become part of the diet of local people.
Food shop in India
ABOUT THE RECIPES