RipeFigsReview
Cookbooks aren’t just collections of recipes anymore. They are expected to tell stories—usually about the author or her theory of better living through better eating. And alongside their roles as memoir and social agenda, cookbooks can also be travelogues, especially when the focus is on ethnic foods.
Ripe Figs: Recipes and Stories from Turkey, Greece, and Cyprus, answers to all of the above. Yasmin Khan opens her cookbook at a migrant camp on the Greek island of Lesvos, where she pitched in at a community center serving meals to refugees, many of them survivors of a perilous journey across the Mediterranean from Libya. Migration is also part of her personal story. Her family had roots in Pakistan, lived in Iran but left that country for the UK. She now lives in London. A fond childhood memory involves visiting Turkey, “feasting on sumac and lemon-doused fish kebabs, drinking cartons of piquant sour cherry juice, and picking up dense sticky squares of pistachio baklava with my fingers.”
In a sense, the foods she focuses on in Ripe Figs are the fruit of migration, the ebb and flow of empires and religions, armies and merchants, over a corner of the Eastern Mediterranean whose nations share climate, flora and fauna. The reality is that the kitchens of Turkey, Greece and Cyprus are dialects of a culinary language that sweeps east through Persia, inches northward into the Balkans and south across the North African shore.
Almost needless to add, Khan advocates for a Mediterranean diet with vegetables and legumes as prominent as meat. She stocks her pantry and refrigerator with olive oil, yogurt, butter, cheese, dried herbs and spices, nuts and seeds and fruit molasses. Rice, orzo pasta and bulgar wheat are cooking staples. The flavors are marvelous and most of the key ingredients have their own inherent health benefits.
But beyond the stories and colorful photography, cookbooks still need recipes with clear instructions and promising outcomes. Ripe Figs delivers that as well with sections on breakfast, breadmaking, appetizers, soups, salads, entrees and desserts. Many dishes are vegetarian and Khan gives instruction for going vegan and gluten-free.
Ripe Figs is a joy to read, giving a tactile sense for places and preparations. Like a good food writer, Khan can make you hungry for the meals she describes. Ripe Figs is published by W.W. Norton.
