The Elephant Walk Cookbook
The past couple of weeks I’ve been featuring recipes based on/inspired by/taken from The Elephant Walk Cookbook, written by Longteine de Monteiro and Katherine Neustadt. De Monteiro is the founder of The Elephant Walk restaurant in Boston, Massachussetts. For more information on the restaurant, its history and offerings, you can visit The Elephant Walk website.
The cookbook features simple recipes that can be followed easily by either beginner or advanced cook. The instructions are clear and concise, and brief commentaries/histories can be found on most pages. The illustrations are just lovely, and small pictures of Cambodian ingredients are used to highlight pages all through the book.
The introduction itself is a very eye-opening, informative section on Cambodian history. De Monteiro relates the events that take her from her native country of Cambodia, to France, and eventually to the United States, where Elephant Walk is born. The writing is factual, yet contains a personal touch that makes you feel as if you know De Monteiro and her family. Certainly, trying out the recipes and watching my family partaking of the food that De Monteiro has eaten with hers has provided me with a connection to this Asian country, Cambodia, which before this exploration was, to me at least, just another Asian neighbor. I now have a better appreciation of the interrelated threads that weave through Asian cuisine.
My only frustration with The Elephant Walk Cookbook is not being able to try all the recipes immediately, because some of the ingredients are not available where I am. It is a consolation to know that ingredients are available online through vendors like ethnicgrocer.com. (Plus there are “Chinatowns” within 2 hours of my home, which we visit on a regular basis.) Most encouraging is finding out that De Monteiro has shipped prahok, a fermented fish-rice concoction, probably regarded THE most exotic Cambodian ingredient there is, to people who have not been able to locate it elsewhere. As for me, I think a trip to Boston is in order, if only to visit The Elephant Walk and/or its sister establishment Carambola.
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