Cooking Caribe

In Cooking Caribe, Christopher Idone, author of the pioneering Glorious Food and the award-winning Glorious American Food, turns his distinctive culinary skills to the cuisine of the Caribbean Basin. This colorful, comprehensive cookbook, a collaboration with Trinidadian food expert Helen McEachrane, captures the true flavor of the Caribbean - from the way it cooks to the way it looks - and, along the way, traces how its crazy-quilt cuisine evolved.

Cooking Caribe presents recipes for 150 inventive, easy-to-prepare dishes characteristic of each major island - garnished with Paula Munck's brilliant, sun-stroked paintings of local sights and scenes. Ten chapters, covering the full spectrum of island cookery, take us from rum-kissed drinks to festive fruit desserts. There are tasty finger-food appetizers; hearty one0pot soups and stews that are the backbone of West Indian cooking; meat dishes with a difference; a dozen variations that give chicken new verve; fresh takes on fish; a treasury of traditional vegetable, bean and grain recipes; and a compendium of condiments and sauces.

Like most aficionados, Christopher Idone finds food lore fascinating - and while he writes about it knowledgeably and with charm. In an evocative introduction and in vignettes of island life that begin each chapter, he explores the extraordinary amalgam of influences that shaped the Caribbean's varied and creative cuisine - and tracks the many culinary contributions of Europe, Africa, India and China to its intriguing diversity. For cooks who share his curiosity, he has included a glossary of terms that may be unfamiliar.

Abundant and beautiful, Cooking Caribe is a cookbook of substance and style, the perfect dish for anyone interested in food - and in what it can tell us about other places, other people and other times.