Dzīves garša by Ilze Jurkāne (2011)

I have never read a cookbook from cover to cover, but since this is an autobiographical cookbook from a woman I knew in childhood, I decided to read it all.  Ilze Auzere now Jurkane  is a few years older than me, so as a child we weren’t really friends, but her mother was one of my teachers and I played in a couple of Latvian school plays with her brother. When Latvia regained its independence, she moved to Latvia, helped set up their banking system, and married a well known politician. Ilze and I had become Facebook friends and I was going to meet her this summer while in Latvia, but then she ended up being out of the country most of the time. She sent me her book – The Taste of Life.

First of all, I was interested in her autobiography, as I knew her whole family. The first thirteen pages is a retelling of her family’s life with lots of pictures. She mentions a lot people I knew or knew of, especially the Hell’s Kitchen crowd, our New York Latvian artist and bohemian group. The rest of the book is really a cookbook divided into 17 chapters, most of them regions of the world. Ilze has traveled a lot, so each region begins with a page relating her travels in the region with accompanying personal photos. If I were to retell my life story, it too would include a lot fo my travels, though I have mostly criss-crossed the U.S. and some of Europe, but food has never been a focus. I have only a few sharp food memories, like my first bouillabaise in a restaurant on a ship in St. Louis or the Swedish smorgasbord in Stockholm, or fresh crab and lobster off the coast of Maine, mussels we picked ourselves in Assateaque Island in Maryland. OK, so if I start thinking about it, I do have food memories, but when I travel, I don’t plan around food.

I have to mention one other cookbook. When I opened a tiny bookstore in SE Ohio back in the late 1970’s, and got in our shipment of books, my partner and I drooled over the Betty Crocker International Cookbook. He said he wanted to try every recipe pictured. I bought the book and started trying out recipes. Soon after I moved to Michigan and had to feed dinner to 19 students in the Latvian program for a whole year. That first semester I did not repeat any recipes using that cookbook (except my lasagna which was from the Moosewood Cookbook.)

Ilze’s cookbook is the ultimate international cookbook with 320 recipes from 55 countries. It has a recipe for just about anything I can think of- bouillabaise or tiramisu or Black Forest Cake. It starts out with American food, as she grew up in the States. It goes through Mexico, Spain & Latin America, Africa, New Zealand, Asia, Mediterranean, France, Italy, Central Europe, British Empire, Northern Euriope, Eastern Europe, Slavic kitchen, Latvia, healthy food and holiday fare. With each recipe she explains when it could be appropriate, what to serve it with and variations. I have tried some of the recipes and they have turned out well. The only slight bump is that all the quantities given are metric, so instead of cups it is in grams and milliliters and Centigrade rather than Fahrenheit for temperatures. I have created my own conversion tables for the book. Some of the ingredients are different than are available here.  I ran into this problem when I tried to treat my relatives to some of my favorite recipes. When I made a cheese cake, there were no graham crackers in Latvia, I had to use other crackers, and am thrilled that Ilze suggests the same ones I ended up using.