Bulgarian National Cuisine

Българска национална кухня на английски език. This seems to me to be the real deal and the very last word on genuine Bulgarian cuisine.
Most of the recipes lean heavily toward meat ingredients except, of course, for the salads which are chiefly reminiscent of Greek-type salads (no lettuce.) There are also bounties of unique regional bread and dessert recipes which I doubt that you would find anywhere else.

It's not really a down-side of the work to point out that this book design wreaks of a 1950s American cookbook in its actual presentation. The assembled food photos with the traditional chef standing behind these displays reveal mostly either dark or poorly-thought-out backdrops. In one background near a hotel, one can't help but notice lots of weeds where the lawn is in dire need of tending. One particular "pile of sausage" photo (they use the term "mouth-watering" to describe this doubtful assemblage) was especially egregious-looking by contemporary Western standards. But this is not really a Western culture so customs are of course viewed differently there and I'm A-O-K with that - it just caught my attention.

But I actually got a real hoot while perusing a couple of the photos of one ancient old geezer who is portrayed on the back cover and in the colour photo section following page 80 as well. He's all dressed up in some form of brown official-looking civilian uniform and in one picture he's standing quite rigid, blowing through a tube into some form of a camel (or other large critter) bladder, preparing to play the noted pipe which emerges on the bottom side... this contrivance seems to be a very primitive and unadorned form of bagpipes. In a similar photo he's sitting among others basically doing the same thing with the bio-musical bladder. In both photos, I was thinking that he might have actually died prior to the photo-shoot, based upon his glassy expression and inflexible demeanor, and they perhaps went ahead and propped up the poor old guy to still achieve the celebratory ambiance. But, enough of that.

There are lots of organ meat recipes in here and certain ingredients are featured, most of which are truthfully not very popular here in the states (tripe, tongue, etc.) But on the bright side, there were lots of versions of beef, lamb, chicken, and soup dishes which I'm ready to try right away such as "Rustic Chicken Stew" (page 68.) There are numerous large colour photos of these intriguing dishes, these pages not being numbered nor are they included in the total number of book pages.

So, if you're into ethnic and/or eastern European foods, this book is certainly worthwhile. Author Plamen Slavchev tells us that Bulgarian dishes are most often extensions of foods from bordering Slavonic regions, Greece, and Turkey and it would appear that this is so. One small caveat: the ingredients for the recipes are apportioned via the metric system but that's easy enough to convert.

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