Annuciato Rames

A lot of VERY pretty food photographs and huge typefaces do not make up for the startling lack of any there there. This is simply not a very interesting book to me. And (as I've mentioned elsewhere) I do not like books about foreign food that avoid using the native names for the dishes they describe. Very occasionally she'll give the Portuguese name, but in quotes. Mostly not. And in some cases, where a direct translation of a dish's name might give us some insight into the sweet coziness that lives in Brazilian cuisine, she goes with a description name instead - for instance "Rice with Coconut" instead of "Widow's Rice". Also, there are some serious translation errors in this book. She calls for "corn flour" and "potato flour" when she means, respectively, "corn starch" and "potato starch". She also doesn't explain what she means by "palm oil", which will certainly screw up some of the recipes in here. What's needed is crude palm oil which is bright orange and sweet smelling and quite, well, foreign. Almost (but not quite) impossible to get in this country. Also some explanation might be in order as to in what ways Brazilian dried meat is so different from dried meat elsewhere. Oh. And my Feijoada kicks her ass. So. I don't like this book much. Walk right by this cook book, please.… (meer)