Regional Cooking from Middle-Earth: Recipies of the Third Age

Rating:
Summary: Regional Cooking From Middle-earth:Recipes of The Third Age
Review: I own this book, and it has most of my favorite recipes in it. I love the little twists on traditional recipes, which is what the introduction tells us. It's like being in Middle-earth. The author paid very close attention to what foods would have been available to the people who could have lived there, and the preparations were very traditional. I also liked the use of whole foods and the vegetarian options. It is a cookbook that anyone could use, and that's what makes it so much fun. It is the perfect gift.

Rating:
Summary: Regional Cooking From Middle-earth:Recipes of The Third Age
Review: I own this book, and it has most of my favorite recipes in it. I love the little twists on traditional recipes, which is what the introduction tells us. It's like being in Middle-earth. The author paid very close attention to what foods would have been available to the people who could have lived there, and the preparations were very traditional. I also liked the use of whole foods and the vegetarian options. It is a cookbook that anyone could use, and that's what makes it so much fun. It is the perfect gift.

Rating:
Summary: Recipes From Middle-Earth? Not very believable.
Review: I received Regional Cooking from Middle-Earth as a Yuletide gift, and was very excited to see it after having read a positive review in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. However, after closely looking through the book, I'm sorry to say that I can only give it 1 star. I am sure Stephanie Simmons (Emerald Took) is a lovely person (er, Hobbit) and seems to have had some fun in creating the book, but it's just not what I had in mind. Here are the main problems I have with it:

• The very title, Regional Cooking from Middle-Earth, is misleading in respect to the content. Most of the recipes are pretty commonplace (with a few exceptions, including interpretations of Ent Draught and Lembas), such as hamburgers, chili, three-bean-salad, devilled eggs, etc. None of the ingredients in these dishes are very interesting or unique, and their banality is disguised by an exotic Elvish name.

• In the recipes, the author often calls for powdered herbs and spices such as garlic powder, dried basil, and dried parsley. Since the author extols the virtues of fresh and whole foods elsewhere in the book, why the use of insipid dried herbs/spices? Some of these are fine dried, such as rosemary or cumin (among others), but dried parsley? It tastes like nothing!

• I know that the author's intent was to leave many of the recipes open to vegetarians and sometimes vegans (of which I am grateful), but she uses vegetable oil (something I can't imagine being widely available in Middle-Earth) as the fat in foods such as cakes. It seems more likely that butter would be used instead, and oil makes for fairly heavy cakes and cookies without adding any flavor. Speaking of not being widely available in Middle-Earth, I doubt Miracle Whip (which appears in recipes) existed there, either.

• It is self-published and spiral-bound. Spiral binding can be useful in a cookbook, but the unprofessional, self-published look is (unfortunately) more annoying than charming. The font used throughout the book is presumably meant to look quaint, but makes readability a bit of a problem. Also, the book is in need of a simple copy editor - there are several grammatical errors that would be easy to fix had someone just given it a second look.

All in all, my expectations of Regional Cooking from Middle-Earth were just too high. I apologize if my criticism sounds too harsh; it's just one opinion, after all. As a big fan of Tolkien as well as an advocate of cooking with whole and organic foods, I expected a wonderful marriage of interesting, simple, and healthful new recipes which the author researched carefully to match regions in Middle Earth. Instead, it's a fairly pedestrian cookbook with the recipe names in Elvish, a handful of genuinely imaginative, Middle-Earth-inspired recipes, and some anecdotes (which admittedly are sweet and add a homey touch to the book).

The Middle-Earth-inspired recipes should have been posted (or offered for sale) on one of the many Tolkien fan sites; the rest of them ought to have stayed in the author's kitchen. I hope it isn't true, but I can't help but wonder if, in composing this cookbook, the author wanted to capitalize a bit on Tolkien's recent popularity...