Maureen Abood’s ‘Rose Water & Orange Blossoms’ Takes You to Lebanon

posted on: May 23, 2015

We cooks may have fallen hard for Middle Eastern cuisine, but for the most part, we’ve done it haphazardly, stirring disparate elements of the region into one sun-drenched, sumac-flecked, tahini-laced stew.

It’s a lot like Americans’ early love affair with Italian food back in the 1970s, before regional parsing deepened our knowledge of the olive-oil-drizzled pizzas of Naples and Bologna’s delicate tortellini.

Happily, this is changing as mainstream publishers release cookbooks with a more nuanced approach to Middle Eastern cooking. In 2012, there was “Jerusalem,” in which Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamini highlighted the diversity of influences — Jewish, Arab, Christian, North African and European — that define the city’s foodways. In 2013, “The New Persian Kitchen” by Louisa Shafia explored Iranian flavors in both traditional and contemporary ways. And most recently, there is Maureen Abood’s “Rose Water & Orange Blossoms” (Running Press 2015), which delves deeply and delectably into the cuisine of Lebanon.

Source: www.nytimes.com