Gastronomy at its best

I wasn’t hungry when I started, but six pages into Rick Stein’s From Venice to Istanbul and my tummy was rumbling like a magnitude seven earthquake.

A minute later, the phone rang, it was the seismology department at the university.

This is a mouthwatering culinary travelogue going east from the canal capital of the world through Croatia and Albania to the meeting point of Europe and Asia, spiced expertly with a soupçon of some of the most delightful writing to be found in any genre.

South African audiences may remember the travels of this Cornish restaurateur with his dog Chalkie (alas no longer with us) on BBC television.

In From Venice to Istanbul, Rick talks to the cooks, the Mamas, the chefs and the street vendors in and around cities and towns throughout his journey to bring us food cooked the way real people cook it, the way the villagers and off-the-beaten–trackers enjoy it, the way Tony Lozica, from Korcula (where Marco Polo was born), makes the Croatian Green Stew endemic to the region.

Suggesting replacement ingredients for those which are almost solely available in the regions of the recipes, Rick brings the reader more than 100 enticements with a comment on

each, whether it be the relative merits of cooking octopus in the Greek style or the Galician spiced paprika preparation or the preponderance of yoghurt in much of Turkey’s cuisine .

In fact it is his Octopus alla Glorijet from Dubrovnik on the Dalmatian coast (page 72) which grabbed me the most. Or was it the Seafood Linguine from Albania (page 235)?

Sometimes, as in the Risotto alla Torcellana (page 246), he alters the original recipe because it uses what he considers far too many ingredients; or he admits to his bigotry against pizza sans tomatoes being blown out of the kitchen by the Pizza Bianco with sliced potatoes, onions, white anchovies and taleggio (page 89) which he almost (but not quite) suggests has become his preference over the red variety.

He delights in the regional flatbreads like the Piadina from Venice (page 91) and the Gozleme from Turkey (page 95) and what you can put into them like sautéed lambs liver with chilli, cumin, red onions and sumac, also from Turkey (page 105).

Rick Stein is known (perhaps mistakenly) first and foremost, as a fine seafood chef and it is little wonder that my attention was caught by his typically Greek Barbecued Sardines in vine leaves (page 213) which is native to the city of Canakkale on the Hellespont and a stone’s throw from ancient Troy.

But then, the Circassian Chicken from Turkey (page 190), trumpeting as it does the use of nuts in savoury dishes, is also good.

You don’t have to be a lover of Eastern Mediterranean food to relish these recipes.

You need only be a lover of food, so if you buy only one cookbook this year, may we suggest it’s From Venice to Istanbul.