Rainbow Cuisine

Rating:
Summary: Tasty recipes and beautiful pictures
Review: I bought this book in South Africa more or less for the pretty pictures, but it has become my favorite and most used cookbook. As most cookbooks are, this cookbook is broken into sections for different parts of the meal: Soups and Salads, Side dishes, Poultry, Fish, Meat, Sambals and Preserves, Breads and homebakes. It also includes a section on making your own spice mixtures (like garam masala and roasted masala) and basic condiments (like mayonnaise). Favorite recipes among my friends and family include the Cape Brandy Pudding and Chicken biryani. In between each section are descriptions of the different regions of South Africa, replete with crisp and glittering photographs of flora, fauna, and scenery. Rainbow Cuisine it ultimately true to its name: it has a wide variety of recipes, reflecting the wide variety of cultures of South Africa, from Cape Malay to English and from Afrikaner to Ndebele. Although some of the dishes are pretty much impossible to make in the US (Roast loin of kudu, for example), those dishes are in the minority and, other than meats, it uses ingredients that are widely available (though some translation might need to be involved: like naartje = tangerine and sodium bicarbonate = baking soda). The only semi-inconvenient issue the book has is that all of the measurements in the recipes are given in metric units and temperatures are given in Celsius. There is a very useful conversion table in the back of the book, and if you're less forgetful than I am, you should have no problem, but I inevitably forget to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit and then wonder why it takes so long for everything to cook. That said, I love this book. It's perfect as a gift - I take any excuse to buy it for my friends and family (birthdays, holidays, or just because I found it on sale), and everyone who uses it loves it.