Ethnic American Cooking: Recipes for Living in a New World

This condensed version of 2015’s two-volume Ethnic American Food Today: A Cultural Encyclopedia essentially replicates its source material while magnifying its flaws. Arranged alphabetically by country of immigrant origin , the entries briefly survey the country, its culture, key flavors, and iconic dishes, and provide recipes exemplifying those qualities. That’s a lot to chew on, but Long offers readers only an amuse-bouche. Her dish selections (often sourced from cited third parties; many are repurposed from her previous work) are frustratingly arbitrary. African-Americans have made significant contributions to American cuisine, but merit just a single recipe (pan-roasted collard sprouts), while Croatia and the Netherlands receive three apiece. Italy is a country rich in culinary history with recipes for any given dish often varying from town to town. Here, Long limits herself to just a few paragraphs to cover the cuisine’s influence on America and just two recipes: spaghetti with anchovies and walnuts, and chicken with potatoes and peas. It adds up to a book that raises more questions than it answers. To Long’s credit, she suggests plenty of other works to follow up with should a dish or cuisine spike the reader’s interest (including Ethnic American Food Today), but the larger question of why this digest exists isn’t really answered. The book might be useful in a school or institutional context, but readers hoping for a survey of how countless cultures have influenced American cuisine will be left hungry. (Oct.)