Can These Cuisines Be Saved?

“Mediterranean Grains and Greens: A Book of Savory, Sun-Drenched Recipes” by Paula Wolfert. HarperCollins; $27.50, 368 pp.

“The Melting Pot: Balkan Food and Cookery” by Maria Kaneva-Johnson. Prospect Books; $35, 384 pp.

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Saving endangered species--of foodways, not birds or flowers--is one of today’s major cookbook motifs. In fact, it often seems that most of the people in the field with anything worth saying are busy, as they might put it, “preserving a vanishing way of life,” “recording a unique legacy,” “renewing a landscape’s ancient traditions” or the like.

It would be wonderful if vanishing ways of life could be preserved for the wishing--or would it? The trouble is that the wishes frequently belong to people who don’t have to live the lives they want to save.

I’ve always eagerly drunk in accounts of sons or daughters of the soil drying their own chestnuts to make flour or pressing green grapes into verjuice. I used to resurface from such cookbook journeys with a yearning to step from my world into that one.

Now my first reaction tends to be a feeling of having come back from some sort of theme park, along with an awful sense that a vast heritage of serious work stands to perish in the near future unless it falls into the hands of people rich and leisured enough to play at it in state-of-the art American kitchens. Remember the New Yorker cartoon of the smarmy couple showing off a new toy to equally well-buffed guests with some modest declaration like, “It’s a simple little mill for grinding your own grain”?

Just what relationship can we, stuck here in our own lives, honestly forge with the surviving remnants of other people’s pasts? It depends on who’s making the introductions and why. I find more sadness in cookbooks of the vanishing-heritage ilk than I used to--more wishful thinking in the face of inexorable change. Yet the best of them do very real honor to what they commemorate.

Two ambitious works go about the task in thoroughly different ways. Paula Wolfert’s “Mediterranean Grains and Greens” exemplifies the cookbook as a stimulating, imaginative rescue effort that promises to enlist you, the reader-cook, as part of the mission. It offers about 180 recipes from the whole Mediterranean basin--Crete to the Camargue, Alicante to Anatolia--collected during years of indefatigable treks to seek out the “many great women” whom Wolfert credits with teaching her about the grains and greens of the title (corn, barley, rice, wheat or wheat flour in various forms, leafy vegetables, wild or unusual green plants from mallow to shepherd’s purse).

The recipes are a noble array presented with irresistible enthusiasm; many breads, few pastries, a wealth of green or greens-enriched salads, rousing soups, unusual and exciting risottos, a good selection of Spanish arroces, lots of stewed dishes (vegetarian and other) featuring greens, grains and/or pastas. As always with Wolfert, the directions are rigorously worked out and written with precise, intelligent detail. You can bet that the minutest measurement or timing came from no-pains-spared trials.

So far I’ve made a hummus-like dish (with the chickpeas left whole, not pureed) liberally laced with parsley, a “couscous” made with barley grits rather than semolina and a version of cacik (the Turkish yogurt-garlic sauce) with chopped mixed greens and Swiss chard. All were exactly what they were cracked up to be and more.

But recipe formulas are only a part of what drives Wolfert’s books. In a way she recalls 19th century travel writers like Richard Burton, who vicariously led a dazzled readership on marvelous quests for forbidden cities and mythic headwaters.

Her accounts of recipe searches embody the thrill of an always-rewarded chase ending in often arduous (sometimes herculean) summum bonum. As she says of a ratatouille involving some 25 pounds of ingredients, “My theory is that when you find the holy grail of a dish, you must respect it and never corrupt it.”

The implicit message to the audience is that they too can join the quest. This is where I start to wonder. For most American cookbook buyers--certainly including me--following the grail will mean first shopping for it (in the form of Tuscan kale, Spanish smoked paprika, the “farm-fresh eggs” that Wolfert always specifies and so forth) through the right sources, then obeying the numbered steps of the recipe treasure map. I’m not sure how closely the business of using the book connects with what Wolfert ardently identifies as her ultimate motivations for writing it: her newfound passion for the edible wild plants of the Earth (“. . . I’ve lived the cycle of the hunter-forager, gathering greens in Italy, Greece, Tunisia and Israel, with food writers, shepherdesses, chefs and home cooks”), and sense of an urgent bond with “a way of life rapidly dying out” (i.e., foraging for greens).

Somehow this romantic quest for the green world remains removed from both the recipes, which are carefully planned to use commercial green produce, not foragings, and the substance of the book, in which all those marvelous wild greens figure as colorful marginalia, getting into a small appendix and a list of mail-order sources and a lot of vivid headnotes but never receiving detailed methodical attention in their own right. The material on grains is fuller but tends to be randomly scattered in hard-to-find notes and sidebars, not organized in one good place where you could get a systematic fix on, say, the different kinds of wheat berries called for at different points.

Still, Wolfert stands apart from most other writers who rhapsodize over primal foods and foodways through her awareness of certain ironies in the basic mission. When in one breath she describes a young peasant woman in southern Turkey patiently making up a year’s supply of tarhana (bits of a dried flour or bulgur mixture) and in the next shows her using some for a soup and plugging in a hand-held electric blender to puree the result, it’s worth a thousand paragraphs spent analyzing cultural evolution and devolution. She is one voyager who knows that the world she’s trying to report from is not standing still any more than the one she’s reporting to.

This book will be easier to use if you also own Wolfert’s “Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean.” It’s not just that the contents are partly complementary but also that the older book helps to fill in for some defective machinery in the not-very-well-organized new one. Even by today’s prevailing abysmal standards, the index is terrible: The egg dishes are missing the heading “Eggs,” and the stunning number of things not indexed by any alphabetical clue starts with the “Tarhana Salad with Peppers” photographed on the book jacket. The table of contents is also hopelessly skeletal. You’ll save time and exasperation by just looking up many items in “Eastern Mediterranean.”

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Maria Kaneva-Johnson’s “The Melting Pot: Balkan Food and Cookery” from the British publisher Prospect Books--available in this country through specialty cookbook stores--shares many areas of interest with Wolfert’s “Grains and Greens” and “Eastern Mediterranean.” The Bulgarian-born Kaneva-Johnson also writes of food traditions in places undergoing vast change--the most obvious change in this case being waves of carnage amid the debris of the old Titoist Yugoslavia. You may wonder what future horrors await the Balkan lands she describes. Yet her quiet, matter-of-fact book shows those lands knitted together by at least culinary bonds whose strength is singular and moving.

In this work you will find no holy-grail recipes, accounts of gaining wise women’s counsel or passionate avowals of the author’s motives. The protagonist of the Melting Pot is not Kaneva-Johnson but something that emerges here as a true if wildly exogamous cultural family stretching from European Turkey as far as parts of Hungary and Romania. No one could have gotten to know all its branches without many travels and prodigious research in both kitchen and library, yet Kaneva-Johnson never dwells on her own efforts. She tends to let both facts (a graceful historical-geographical survey, a description of traditional cooking paraphernalia) and recipes (about 315) speak for themselves.

What we loosely call “Mediterranean” elements of cooking have been in the Balkans about as long as people: wheat and other grains, grapes and tree fruits, olives and milk, with their daughter-products like porridges, breads, wine, oil, soured milk and cheese. Looking at Kaneva-Johnson’s recipes, one can see that some of these dishes--boiled wheat, millet porridge, versions of the tarhana also described by Wolfert, olives pounded to a paste, milk and cheese poured over broken bread--must be as old as cooking itself.

In patient detail she shows how influence after influence has been piled on, including pre-classical Greek, Macedonian, Roman, Byzantine, southern Slav, Russian-Ukrainian, here and there Italian or Austro-Hungarian and--most inescapably of all--Ottoman Turkish. The final complex of Balkan cuisine, embracing yogurt, risottos, shish kebab, buckwheat kasha, Wiener schnitzel, fish soups, sauerkraut and innumerable savory or sweet variants of the thin “leaf pastry” brought by the Turks, resembles not so much a melting pot as the contents of some enormous many-chambered cellar added to under partly continuous and partly shifting ownerships for at least the last 5,000 years.

It’s one of the world’s great culinary stories, communicated by Kaneva-Johnson almost entirely through recipes and extraordinary attention to the languages of the region. (Let’s hear it for cookbook authors who bother to give and translate original names!) Her leisurely, straightforward cooking directions tend to leave small amounts and minor niceties to individual judgment and emphasize accessible ingredients rather than sending people on shopping missions for the ultimate anything. Though here and there she records some daunting heroic tradition like making whole-head sauerkraut in 100-kilogram quantities, most of these dishes are eminently practical.

Expect to deal with a frustrating index as well as British terminology (“cornflour” for “cornstarch,” for instance) and metric measurements, though I didn’t find the latter two to be awful obstacles. I had nothing but happy results with a Dalmatian take on an Italian brodetto (fish stew), a millet and turnip dish called alleluia, a lamb soup thickened with an egg-lemon mixture, and kyufteta (kofte-like meatballs) baked with yogurt and eggs.

There are people who write about the surviving vestiges of ancient cultural-culinary traditions in such a way as to send many readers forth burning to start a movement, interview guardians of tradition before it’s too late or master half-extinct skills. Of these, none is more able or more conscientious than Paula Wolfert, and I hope her new book accomplishes even a fraction of what she intends.

The achievement of a writer like Kaneva-Johnson is harder to categorize. Maybe it wouldn’t have meant as much to me had I not come to live in one of those quintessential 1990s American multiethnic neighborhoods with (among others) strong Greek-Macedonian-Istrian-Croatian-Turkish components nurtured by far-from-cosmopolitan cooks in far-from-gourmet kitchens. A lesson I took away from “The Melting Pot” is that even when large pieces of an invaluable ancient heritage are being destroyed in one spot before our eyes, something may be left--there or perhaps thousands of miles away--that still belongs to all of us.

* Mendelson is the author of “Stand Facing the Stove: The Story of the Women Who Gave America the Joy of Cooking” (Henry Holt Co., 1996).