Description:
Brooklyn is a melting pot unto itself. Settled by the Dutch and then home to waves of immigrants, including the Irish, Jews, Scandinavians, Italians, Germans, Poles, Hispanics, African Americans, Greeks, and Middle Easterners, the borough is rich in culinary history. Lauding that history, Lyn Stallworth and Rod Kennedy Jr.'s The Brooklyn Cookbook explores in 250 recipes Brooklyn's "hometown" cooking. Replete with nostalgic photos, it also chronicles, in the words of Brooklynites themselves, a larger cultural heritage. Readers who enjoy social-culinary history, and those who relish the diverse, nurturing dishes of everyday urban life, will embrace the book. Dividing its recipes and recollections among chapters such as Resorts and Neighborhoods, Nationalities, and Brewed, Made, Sold, and Served in Brooklyn, the book reminds us constantly that food is inseparable from the people who prepare and eat it. Here are Mrs. Stahl's Potato Cocktail Knishes, which she sold on the Boardwalk during the Depression; Lundy's Manhattan Clam Chowder, the peerless brew of Brooklyn's famed Sheepshead Bay seafood house; Dee Dee Daily's Pigeon Peas and Rice, a Caribbean-Black American specialty; and Joe Romanelli's mamma's Pizza Rustica, prepared while "pappa and my brothers would sit around drinking homebrew and playing pinochle." The recipes work for all cooks, but it is the stories behind them--"An Italian-American Dinner in 1960," for example, or "A Pail of Beer and Sauerbraten"--that make the book a true culinary treasure. --Arthur Boehm
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