Review: The Way Home
Jan. 13th, 2023 03:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmithWe finished reading the first cookbook of the year. \o/
The Way Home: A Celebration of Sea Islands Food and Family with over 100 Recipes by Kardea Brown. Amistad, October 25, 2022.
This is a Gullah Geechee cookbook, which is a branch of African diaspora soul food. We found many of the recipes heavier than our personal taste preferences, with a reliance on ultraprocessed ingredients; but some others use whole foods, so you can pick and choose along that spectrum. So far the biggest hit has been the Kelewele Dry Spice Mix, normally used to season plantains. We like plantains but they're hard to find around here. Instead I've used the spice mix in Kelewele Molasses Cookies (best molasses cookie I've had) and Spicy Butterscotch Sauce (also excellent). We've also made the Hoppin' John, which is more work than average and mixes the black-eyed peas and rice together during cooking, but the end result tastes better than others I have had. So we're still working on how to streamline that a bit, but we definitely plan to make it again. I consider these discoveries a validation of buying the book. :D
The Way Home is a good balance of cultural information, recipes, and really pretty pictures of Gullah Geechee food, people, and places. The chapters present New Gullah, Sweet Treats, Breakin' the Fast, Preserving, Main Dishes, Sides Salads and More, and Beverages. It has an index that lists both recipe titles and ingredients used in recipes, which is nice, because I've found several cookbooks recently that do only one or the other or don't have an index at all. I also like the glimpses of Gullah Geechee dialect, because I enjoy language diversity and cultural diversity, so it's fun to see the author writing to other people in her home territory.
If you like soul food, African diaspora, the southeast , and/or ethnic cookbooks that offer cultural content alongside recipes, then this is an excellent choice. Highly recommended.
The Way Home: A Celebration of Sea Islands Food and Family with over 100 Recipes by Kardea Brown. Amistad, October 25, 2022.
This is a Gullah Geechee cookbook, which is a branch of African diaspora soul food. We found many of the recipes heavier than our personal taste preferences, with a reliance on ultraprocessed ingredients; but some others use whole foods, so you can pick and choose along that spectrum. So far the biggest hit has been the Kelewele Dry Spice Mix, normally used to season plantains. We like plantains but they're hard to find around here. Instead I've used the spice mix in Kelewele Molasses Cookies (best molasses cookie I've had) and Spicy Butterscotch Sauce (also excellent). We've also made the Hoppin' John, which is more work than average and mixes the black-eyed peas and rice together during cooking, but the end result tastes better than others I have had. So we're still working on how to streamline that a bit, but we definitely plan to make it again. I consider these discoveries a validation of buying the book. :D
The Way Home is a good balance of cultural information, recipes, and really pretty pictures of Gullah Geechee food, people, and places. The chapters present New Gullah, Sweet Treats, Breakin' the Fast, Preserving, Main Dishes, Sides Salads and More, and Beverages. It has an index that lists both recipe titles and ingredients used in recipes, which is nice, because I've found several cookbooks recently that do only one or the other or don't have an index at all. I also like the glimpses of Gullah Geechee dialect, because I enjoy language diversity and cultural diversity, so it's fun to see the author writing to other people in her home territory.
If you like soul food, African diaspora, the southeast , and/or ethnic cookbooks that offer cultural content alongside recipes, then this is an excellent choice. Highly recommended.
