The World of Street Food: Easy Quick Meals to Cook at Home

Street food is term used, for lack of a better one, to describe the kind of spicy, casual, delicious and local cuisine sold in stalls, carts and open-air markets all over the world. This volume offers a well-chosen battery of street food favorites from locales as diverse as Pakistan and Argentina. Chile's Sopaipillas, sticky-sweet pumpkin-flavored donuts, make for a sinful brunch or afternoon snack, as do Libya's Almond Cookies or China's Baozi, steamed buns filled with flavorful mushrooms or chicken. Heartier recipes include Sudan's Ful, a delicious bean stew, and Malaysia's Pacri Nenas, a sweet and spicy pineapple curry. Reflecting the high price of meat on the global table, most of these recipes are vegetarian or vegan, and those that aren't can be easily adapted to exclude meat. The authors do their best to avoid impossible-to-find ingredients, although once in a while a recipe calls for some bit of exotica like lily buds or chicha de jora, a beer brewed from corn. Appealing, full-color photographs of markets and streetside chefs round out the collection, although, strangely, the photographs don't always correspond to the recipes they adorn; a shot of a taqueria in Chicago, for instance, complements a recipe for Argentinian sandwiches. This juxtaposition is a bit confusing, since Argentina and Chicago have little in common-except that, apparently, the sidewalks of both are great places to dine.