The Yemenite Cookbook

This is a very slim volume with few Yemeni recipes. Those that are in the book are not bad ( not great either) but the book does not begin to touch on the depth and range of Yemeni cooking. There are very few bread recipes ( and there are dozens of great Yemeni breads). And few lamb and poultry dishes. I had hoped to get a glimpse of he kind of recipes often featured in great Yemeni restaurants in New York and Washington DC areas but there was nothing like that in this book. The book reminds me of the old joke where someone complains "the food was bad and there was so little of it."

This is NOT a Yemenite cookbook. It is a cookbook that was written by someone who is Yemenite. With few exceptions, the recipes are not Yemenite. The author owned a restaurant and published recipes from his eatery here. For the most part, they are the type of dishes that were popular in Israel in the 70's and 80's. Calling this book Yemenite would be like referring to Emeril Lagasse's "Louisiana Real and Rustic" a Portuguese cookbook.An example of how un-Yemenite this cookbook is would be the chapter on fish. Yemenite Jews traditionally never ate fish! Yemenites cook a vast array of breads. Only ONE traditional Yemenite bread recipe appears here. No recipes for the hawayej's, none on the famous chick-pea dumplings known as falafel (poached on Passover and served in soup, fried during the year; sold in the streets in Israel during the late 1800's by Yemenite Jews the same way Russian Jews hawked knishes in 19th century New York and Portuguese Jews sold fried fish and chipped potatoes in England in the 17th), no hilbe or or any of the wonderful soups.I have been looking for a Yemenite cookbook for years and was very excited to have found this on Amazon. What an incredible disappointment this was. Very few Jewish or Israeli cookbooks dedicate space to Yemenite foods. Even Claudia Roden gave Yemenite foods short shrift in her magnum opus. I had such high hopes for this.Sigh. $25 in the trash.

Interesting look into another cuisine.

Interesting recipes. I haven't gotten into the depths of this cookbook yet but I skimmed through after receiving it. The recipes sound novel but not overly complex. I think the dessert section was the most interesting as the desserts were not sweet confections, but variations on some savory combinations.