Around the World in 26 Meals: No. 9 - Mauritius

Intro

We now skip the original post nine, which is delayed until summer, to focus on Mauritius. Why Mauritius? Well, I somehow ended up with a copy of a cookbook on Mauritian food and though it’d be interesting to finally try it. Also Mauritian food was a minor feature of my childhood in the form of sausage rougail with lentils, something I wrongly thought was integral to a rougail. Truth be told I expect this book was intended to end up with my sister, who is from my mother’s first marriage to a Mauritian man, but as it’s in my possession for now I should give it a whirl!

As is usual the food of a country reflects its history and, as a colonial country, Mauritius has a diverse history but one with its fair share of sadness - not least its famous ecological destruction and the stain of slavery (its food is often referred to as a creole cuisine, with the creoles being the mixed-race descendants of slaves). However, as one of those rare places that was genuinely uninhabited until the last millennium there’s no history of oppression of natives, although the Arabs and Portuguese knew of the island no-one lived there until the Dutch founded a colony on the island (and said colony didn’t ultimately survive). Take you wins where you can get them, I suppose.

On account of there being no human history on the island prior to the Dutch I suppose the culinary history of the islands starts with them and, as you would expect given the colony failed, their impact on Mauritian history is quite limited. They introduced new species, such as deer and sugar cane, some Mauritian place names are Dutch in origin and they, as the first humans to a unique and delicate island ecosystem, inevitably caused huge ecological damage. Bye bye, dodo and much of the ebony forests. Also, hello slavery. But actual influence of Dutch food on Mauritian seems pretty much absent and, aside from introduction of deer, the book I use barely mentions them.

A few years after the Dutch leave the French arrive and make a better stab at this whole colonisation thing. The island is developed and becomes a successful colony for growing spices and raiding British ships. As the country is still francophone and the influence of French food on Mauritian food is, shall we say, not insubstantial this was a very important period in its history. But all things must come to an end and French Mauritius met its end at the same time as the Napoleon did. Well the first time Napoleon met his “end”, anyway.

The British, perhaps upset at having their ships raided, took control of the island but signed an agreement to uphold the current language, law and traditions of the island - which, so far as I’m aware, they seemed to have honoured. As the British ran the island for longer than the French you’d expect a big influence there as well and, well, it can be debated.

The cookbook takes particular care to note that British food has not influenced Mauritian food - a point somewhat undercut by mentioning roast beef as a common meal, inclusion of what is clearly a modified prawn cocktail recipe, Worcestershire sauce cropping up across the book and talking a lot about the British influence on a recipe involving palm hearts and bacon. So I’m going to say British food did directly influence Mauritian food and the authors simply didn’t want to acknowledge it. And truth be told I can’t blame them. I’m a big defender of British food in that I think it’s long since outgrown its stereotypes and when it fails to deliver it’s more about execution than concept. But this book was published in the 1980s, even in the 1990s the food here was a lot worse than it is now, people didn’t really make an effort and my country’s poor reputation was much more justified. Nevertheless, understandable as it is to try and deny it it seems to me that British food did indeed influence Mauritian food, albeit far less than French food did.

Regardless of the extent of influence of British food that big old red empire did make a huge impact on the cuisine of the island via the system of indentured servitude that replaced slavery upon emancipation. East Asian workers came in initially, bringing a Chinese influence on the cuisine that my book refers to but generally fails to evidence, and an Indian influence that clearly has had a massive impact on shaping what Mauritian food is. Save for maybe onion, turmeric and ginger seem the most common ingredients in the recipes I’ve seen. This huge influence is understandable given ethnic Indians have had a massive role in Mauritius’ history in general.

The blending of cultures have resulted in a mixing of tradition, though also to friction among different ethnicities on the island. Towards the end of British rule the island participated in campaigns against Vichy France’s colonies and independence followed in the 1960s, followed in the 1990s by the island becoming a republic within the Commonwealth. I doubt these events impacted the cuisine all too much in itself but it felt rude to not mention it given the importance they’d have to present day Mauritians.

Finally there are also other aspects of the food where I’m simply unaware of the origin. There’s, understandably, a lot of use of the kind of ingredients you find on tropical islands, jackfruit and so on - indeed there’s a fair amount of crossover with Caribbean food in this regard (on top of the Indian influence they both share). Whether this aspect of the food is something the creoles developed themselves, something the slaves brought from the African mainland or Madagascar or something which came with colonialism I simply don’t know - I suspect all three contributed but am not equipped to give a solid answer. Overall all these influences make an interesting blend of influences for a cuisine which seems under-appreciated outside the French speaking world, which seems to have a bit more time for Mauritian food (even if it’s often lumped in with that of Reunion!).

The book

Today’s cookbook is Exotic Cuisine of Mauritius, a title that seems a tad orientalist today. This edition of the book was from the 1980s though, as previously stated, and although I’d expect that title still seemed old-fashioned back then perhaps it jumped out less. Still, a title’s just a title.

I’d tried to find out a bit more about the authors but came up short. One, Philippe Lenoir, did ring a bell but I wasn’t sure how - perhaps he did something notable beyond this book or maybe he even was/is a member of my step-family who I’d forgotten about (I’ve only met the French side of that step-family and he lacks their distinctive surname but if he was connected to the book that would explain how I ended up with it). Ultimately I don’t know anything more for sure about Lenoir than I do about de Revel.

What I cooked (and adjustments)

I got too ambitious, again, by miscounted the recipes I was attempting. Some recipes were on the same page, I just forgot that I needed to make rice, I wasn’t selective enough. So, full disclosure, I was rushed off my feet cooking all of this and I did forget to take some photos. Hopefully the gist will still be clear! And, as always, asfoetida replaces garlic.

The original intend was to base the whole thing around a venison curry - game evidently being a much more accessible to ordinary people there than here given the sheer number of recipes involving it (far more than for beef or pork). However the meat arrived on Wednesday, I spent twelve hours cooking on Saturday without getting round to the curry and I was unavailable on Sunday. Come Monday the venison had spoiled, so no venison curry. Sad times.

The other game dish did get made and was described as roasted marinated wild boar (I chose this to show the more European side to the cuisine) and, though I was able to source the meat, there were some decisions that needed to be made as the recipe offered some choices. I used parsley as a herb in the marinade instead of basil, I decided that “red port” in the ingredients list was referring to ruby port (I personally prefer tawny on the rare occasions I drink port but can see ruby is more robust) and ultimately I decided to omit an optional ingredient described as “4 épices” that may well not be what you think it is.

As you may know quatre épices is a famous French spice blend, common in that cuisine, of pepper, cloves, nutmeg and dried ginger. That is not what is being referred to here. Instead it refers to the West Indian bay leaf, also known as the allspice leaf - which is the most accurate name as it literally is the leaves of the allspice plant. Anyone who’s noticed Google Search’s strange shift to trying to provide you with the most common answer, rather than the most accurate answer, over the last decade will not be surprised that finding a source for these online was a nightmare. I could find one easily, but they only shipped to Canada, and further searches either led me to ordinary bayleaves, French quatre épices mix, allspice berries or strange woo sites selling essential oils. But through perseverance and grit I was eventually able to find a shop where I could buy these leaves and get them shipped to the UK. For £10 per small packet. Shipped from Saint Lucia. At this point I gave up and decided to just omit this ingredient.

Finally, I also doubled the amount of alcohol in the marinade (both port and brandy) as the volume of marinade looked too small to work. My schedule also meant I left it for 48 hours to marinade rather than 24.

The other main course I made was a breadfruit stew, intended to showcase the more island nature of the cuisine or, alternatively, to give me a chance to try breadfruit. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find two key ingredients in this recipe - fresh breadfruit wasn’t possible to obtain and instead I opted for the tinned variety and had to halve the weight to about 1kg. This was a strategic decision motivated primarily by the shop only having 1kg in stock. I also wasn’t able to get pork fatback (a specific cut of pork) at short notice and used thick-cut unsmoked back bacon as the best easy substitute.

The book was rather specific about a Mauritian meal involving several sides: brèdes (vegetable side-dishes of unknown origin, mostly using native plants and with a variety of preparation methods), achards (a vegetable, vinegar and mustard mix referred to as a pickle, though I wouldn’t classify it as such!), chutneys and rice.

As said before brèdes typically involve native plants, which are simply not accessible in the UK (most of them probably nowhere in Europe). However, although most vegetables used are native, there are still a variety of more accessible plants that can be prepared in this way - the broccoli rabe/rapini, watercress, lettuce or bok choi. I opted for bok choi and for cooking it etouffé - unblanched vegetables cooked in their own juices for 10-15 minutes without added water or oil. The alternative was the bouillon method which, as the name implies, would be more of a soup.

The achards had two adjustments made to the recipe - one was simply that I added the vinegar and pepper right at the end of cooking - I don’t know if this is correct or not as the recipe forgot to mention when to add them. The other was an adjustment that the cookbook explicitly allowed for. To explain, one step in the cooking process is “Place [the vegetables] for a whole day in the hot sun”. Being in the UK and cooking in spring the hot sun is somewhat of a problem but a practical alternative was on offer - simply blanching the vegetables for under a minute in boiling water. These achards à la minute were noted as an acceptable alternative, though the author claimed the sun-dried variety is slightly better.

With the chutneys I opted for a coconut chutney and one made from christophenes/chou chou/chayotte, with the latter needing some adjustment. Namely the recipe stated it would take about ten minutes to boil this fruit and have it soft enough to mash with a fork. The recipe lied. The recipe also allowed lemon juice or vinegar as alternative ingredients, I used lemon juice.

It’s been a while since the text was last broken up. Have a chayotte. I doubt you’d find these at a normal supermarket but they are definitely possible to obtain in the UK. I was a bit underwhelmed but maybe there are better ways to use them?

A final side dish I decided to make, largely on impulse, was the purple yam (arouille) croquette. Truth be told I can’t recall if I made any actual changes to the recipe here. However I did have to make a big choice as a purple yam and an arouille are not actually the same thing, despite both being in the name of the recipe. A purple yam can occasionally refer to a purple sweet potato but usually refers to a vegetable also called ube or the greater yam. Whereas arouille is another name for taro/colcassia/dasheen etc. These are similar but different vegetables that generally aren’t considered good substitutes for each other.

Truth me told I wanted to find ube, if the recipe says “purple yam” I’m guessing the mixture is purple, but could only find taro (sold as colcassia) so availability made my choice for me.

As the carb for these dishes, I cooked some basmati rice. No pictures, it’s just plain rice. I used a volumetric “boil dry” method but the cookbook actually has the method involving draining of excess water as its preferred option.

My final recipe was a coconut tart - comprising of a shortcrust pastry and a compote of coconut, sugar and vanilla. For the compote I substituted part of the water for coconut water, as I had two fresh coconuts and no other use for their water.

The pastry recipe was totally absent, save for the measures of the ingredients, and an initial attempt to use the recipe from a different tart in the same book was disastrous and just ended up with bad, uncooked pastry in the bin. Eventually I decided to use the butter and flour measurements from the book, view the water measurements as a maximum and to make the pastry by hand, ignoring any instructions in the actual book.

Cooking

First - boar. These early steps of its preparation were on day 1 (Thursday).

The marinade is put together - oil, grated carrots, chopped onion, parsley, thyme, asfoetida, brandy and ruby port are mixed together and then massaged into the haunch of boar. The mix is then left to sit for 48 hours in the fridge, turned occasionally.

On day 3 (Saturday) the boar is roasted at 180 degrees for an hour, with water added to the marinade to keep it moist and salt used to season the meat.

Once the roasting is done the pan is deglazed, strained and blended with more port, beef stock and water. This sauce is then boiled for several minutes to thicken and poured over the boar.

And the results are … atrocious. The boar is tough and tasteless and only just edible. One step away from leather. The sauce, however is nice, and the meat is reheated slowly in it on subsequent days making the boar much more enjoyable and flavourful on subsequent days.

Still, I don’t view this one as a success and I think there’s an inherent, if easily fixed, flaw in the recipe.

Despite me starting with the boar day 3 actually began with me working on the coconut tart. The butter, flour and salt for the shortcrust is shown in the picture above, as is the sugar for the compote. The pastry ingredients are shown in a blender, following the recipe as detailed in the tropical fruit tart recipe (the coconut tart recipe doesn’t deign to describe making shortcrust so I searched for the most similar recipe that did).

This is a failure and the pastry is discarded but a fresh batch made by hand and only using the cookbook as a very loose guide is made afterwards. This is far more successful and (spoiler alert) ends up pretty much perfect.

Mission number two - open coconuts. In order to do this I initially cut open their true eyes with a small knife and had them drain through a sieve to collect their water, without any gunk from their shells.

I don’t remember whether the pastry mix in the background is for the first, aborted attempt or the second one.

Then, with a lot of effort and every kitchen’s most essential tool, a hammer, I eventually get my coconuts open. It takes a while. One is destined for the tart, the other for chutney.

Pictured below are the ingredients for the coconut chutney - olive oil, coconut, onion, tamarind extract, vinegar and mint. I made the compote for the tart and the coconut chutney in parallel but I’ll focus on the chutney for now.

The first step is grating all this coconut. It takes a while. A really long while.

But the remainder of the preparation is easy - some chopping and some mixing and it’s ready to go. I had forgotten to add ginger to this chutney at the time of this photo but it gets added at a later point.

The coconut chutney is delicious, the sweetness of the coconut pairs perfectly with the tang of the tamarind and vinegar while the mint gives it a bit of lift. Whether it was worth the effort of preparing the coconuts is unclear but it’s certainly excellent.

Slowly boiling the other coconut’s flesh in water, sugar and vanilla eventually yields a sticky, sweet compote.

Ignore the chillis in the background for now!

The tart pastry is laid out in the mould and then briefly baked. I’d used ceramic baking beads to keep the pastry reasonably flat but this actually just lead to their getting stuck in the pastry and to a lot of time spent picking them out again. Live and learn.

At this point the compote is ready to be added so in it goes. Another brief bake and we have…

A tart! Which briefly goes in for a little more browning before it gets eaten.

Messy table! Sorry!

The tart is also delicious. I went so off-piste with the recipe that I think I have to take most of the credit for the pastry base being neither soggy nor dry, but the compote is a delicious tart filling. 10/10, would very loosely follow this recipe again.

Now for chutney two - this one is made with chayotte/chou chou/christophenes. That green thing I posted a picture of earlier that looks a bit like a pear but not really.

This chutney needs oil, boiled chayotte, chopped onion, lemon juice (or vinegar) and parsley. The chayotte is boiled for far longer than the recipe states, as it needs to be mashed, and everything is combined.

Here is the chayotte chutney pre-chayotte. Also pictured are the complete coconut chutney and some of the vegetables used in the brèdes.

And here are both chutneys complete. The coconut one takes pride of place because it’s simply better than the chayotte chutney.

Truth be told the chayotte chutney. was a bit of a let-down, the recipe stated this should be refreshing. However the fruit tastes somewhere between cucumber and marrow and, although not too bad, was more watery and underwhelming than refreshing.

Onto the breadfruit stew - as stated before I couldn’t find fresh breadfruit (so I got canned) or pork fatback (so I fried some unsmoked back bacon). The recipe is simple. The onion, chilli and asfoetida mix is briefly fried and then the cooked bacon, tomato, thyme and parsley mix added for a few minutes.

At this point I add water and the breadfruit themselves and simmer for about half an hour. The large pot in the background contains the brèdes, which I’ll get to in time.

Embarrassingly I forgot to take a picture of the final stew (though it may be in the background of later pictures) but suffice to say it looks similar save that the breadfruit yellows slightly, revealing some pores on its surface and the sauce thickens. Doesn’t look remarkable is what I’m saying.

The stew is delicious. A nice spiced tomato and bacon sauce with the breadfruit in pride of place. And if I were to describe breadfruit I’d say that it’s exactly how it sounds - a fruit that tastes and has some of the texture of bread. The only way in which a breadfruit differs from this description is that that description sounds bloody horrible and breadfruit is actually really nice. This was a highlight, despite my substitutions.

Onto the brèdes etouffé - I didn’t take any pictures of the vegetables pre-chopping (save the chopped onion and tomato shown next to the chutneys earlier) so we proceed directly to the point where I have a large saucepan filled with tomato, onion, ginger and shredded bok choi.

Given the cooking method the vegetables are simply heated gently for 10 minutes and are allowed to cook in their own juices. A lot of chopping to get here but it’s all easy once that’s done.

Even this brief cooking seems to drain a lot of the colour from the vegetables but they remain a flavourful side-dish. I could see myself making it again, even if it all looks a bit limp.

The achards are the final task of day 3. First I prepare the veg that is to be fried early on - it doesn’t look very aesthetically pleasing but I combine vegetable oil, Dijon mustard (if I had mustard oil at the time this would have been omitted), fresh turmeric root and ginger together and prepare chillis and silverskin/baby/pearl onions in another container.

The poor composition of this shot indicates I was getting a bit tired by this point.

I also cut cauliflower into florets, carrots into batons, shred some cabbage (not pictured) and just wash and dump in some mange tout. No real preparation needed for that last vegetable!

Having neither the time to leave these in the sun all day, nor the sun to leave these in the sun all day these vegetables are briefly blanched. Then the ginger and turmeric is briefly fried, with the chilli and onion added afterwards. As the pan in the background of the last photo is clearly too small for all this veg the contents are transferred before the remaining veg is added and cooked for a few minutes.

Apparently I forgot to take a picture of the finished product but hopefully this shows the vegetables retaining their vibrant colour even after cooking. I then move the achards into the vessel that contained the brèdes and I later add vinegar and crushed peppercorns, as the recipe includes these ingredients but doesn’t actually state when they are to be added (which is helpful). The end result looks nice.

I’d made far too much but the achards were a surprise highlight of this cooking project - they had a fresh taste with a light but distinct spicing that gave it more complexity and depth than a simple vegetable medley. The brèdes were nice but these were far better. However the cauliflower florets were too large for my tastes, a fault of my own rather than of the recipe.

Not pictured in this section is the rice I made. Because you all know what plain rice looks like.

Onto day 5 - I discover my venison has spoiled (not great) but decide to plug on with the taro croquettes.

Just like a potato croquette the first stage is essentially making mash, then adding in egg and onion. We also add thyme (not pictured). So let’s skip past the boiling to get…

… taro mash but with egg in. Which looks, frankly, disgusting. The recipe said to add the yolks separately and to whisk the whites, an addition that seemed to achieve nothing of value.

This mix is far too thin to actually make into croquettes and the end products are more like fritters than anything else. Possibly partially because of this the oil tends to foam and smoke quite easily and it is difficult to fry these already fragile fritters. A lot break. Good photos are hard to take.

Personally I’m not a fan of these. The texture is slightly softer than potato and there’s a light, fresh taste to taro that’s absent from potato (which otherwise tastes similar, at least here) but I find the taste of oil dominates the taste of taro and I find it very hard to enjoy these fritters/croquettes.

Perhaps a thicker batter or using ube rather than taro would have produced better results? My partner, however, did seem to enjoy them so perhaps I’m just fussy.

What I’d do differently

Firstly the portion sizes in this book are absurdly large, and I say that as someone who happily doubles the quantities of most recipes when not cooking for this blog. There was simply way too much food, particularly when it came to the brèdes and achards. So perhaps I’d halve the quantities of most things (except in the stew, where I already halved the breadfruit, the tart and the boar).

With the achards beyond cutting down on the volume I would also correct my errors and be sure to cut the cauliflower in it into much smaller florets. If possible I’d also try and find fresh silverskin/baby/pearl onions - but I could only find them frozen or pickled, despite having found them at an ordinary supermarket in the past, so I may not be able to make that change.

I found the boar by far the most disappointing recipe in the whole bunch, it was actively bad. Fortunately I think there’s a very simple solution and that is to slow cook the meat if I were to try it again. From that point finer adjustments could be made but, as the sauce was actually decent, it may not need too much more fiddling beyond changing the cooking time and temperature.

The taro croquettes I feel would require a substantial change in recipe to work, primarily around getting the mashed taro mix to be thick enough to hold a croquette shape - perhaps less milk in the mix or even the addition of flour could help but the recipe is currently pretty far from working as intended. I also expect this recipe would be more amenable to deep frying than shallow frying and ube might be more interesting than taro. Finally I’m not going to bother whisking egg whites if I try this recipe again, it seemed pointless.

With the brèdes, stew, tart and coconut chutney I wouldn’t change anything - though I would consider experimenting with buying coconut chunks or pre-grated coconut rather than whole coconuts as grating coconut consumed a fairly large proportion of my time!

The chayotte chutney I would probably ditch altogether, unless my fruit were unripe (which I don’t think they are) I can’t really see a way of modifying the recipe to get a nice chutney. I can see what the recipe was going for but I’m not convinced.

My view on the book

My first, and biggest, impression of this book is that it is of its time and very old fashioned by today’s standards. This sounds like a bad thing and, well, it’s not a good thing, but it does explain the consistent usage of Imperial weights and of the dreaded cup. And, honestly, I’ve more patience for that in an older cookbook than in one where the publisher was simply to lazy to localise the North American version. It makes some flaws more acceptable.

As an illustration of how old fashioned the book can be I’ve included a picture of a conversion chart for oven temperatures. Celsius is still called Centigrade, Fahrenheit is still implicitly the default measurement and conversions are made for not only British Regulo/Gas Mark values but also to the incompatible French equivalents, which I had no idea even existed. However even this book is not old enough to acknowledge the British cup, a unit I refuse to believe exists.

Another immediate impression is that some cookbooks aim to be practical for an international audience and select recipes or make alterations accordingly, while others aim to be as true a record as possible and present the recipes simply as they are.

Neither approach is better or worse, it’s just a balance between ease and authenticity and either extreme has value, but for what it’s worth this book is very much in the latter camp. Beyond the native vegetables mentioned for use in brèdes there are also recipes for cooking bats (something we can all agree is a good idea given current events…), turtles and wasp larvae.

This is very much a deliberate choice, the authors in the introduction do talk about how foreigners may wish to enjoy some dishes vicariously and how they want to tempt people to the island. Despite this it is made clear that at the time of writing some of these odder recipes (such as the bat or turtle recipes) are very much things of the past even in Mauritius, so I suppose there’s a degree of just recording these records for posterity. An indulgence I can completely understand.

As I typically cover the balance of introductory text to main body content and consider the photography in this section I’ll briefly run through that. The introduction is thorough, contains mostly interesting content and only slightly outstays its welcome at 30 pages. Granted, I would have removed a few pages dedicated to menus for royal banquets and condensed some more rambling sections elsewhere but most of this introduction does add value, particularly given the authors’ stated aim of getting people interested in Mauritius. The book was published in the 1980s and I think the photography shows the book’s age. It’s not a good thing but it’s understandable and just of its time. Not really something I think is fair to criticise too heavily.

What I can criticise, however, are the practicalities of following the recipes. The food, mostly, turned out well but the recipes for said food often seemed to be vague or actively unhelpful and cooking from this book was, at its worst, an absolute nightmare.

As a first complaint is the insistence of the authors in not specifying amounts for certain ingredients. The boar recipe specifies “1 haunch” of boar is needed. How many grams is that again? On top of that many recipes will end with some herbs and spices with no volumes - most recipes in this book which involve ginger and many which involve herbs like parsley or thyme will simply not say how much is needed. Put bluntly, it’s not very helpful!

Another oddity is the inconsistency of expected knowledge in the book. As an example, in the introduction there are, somewhat indulgently, five pages dedicated to wine and on page four it tells us that red wine should be paired with meat. Thanks for the info, book.

In sharp contract the coconut tart opens with “make a paté brisée” with no further elaboration. There is no dedicated recipe for said pastry and the cookbook just expects its reader to know that this means shortcrust pastry and how to make it. There is a pastry recipe several pages on, granted, but it: a) never uses the words shortcrust or paté brisée; b) never links this recipe to that of the coconut tart; and c) doesn’t actually work. My going freestyle actually worked out better than the pastry recipe provided. So, not ideal.

There’s also some oddities in translation, beyond arbitrarily not translating paté brisée, with one quirk being consistently referring to tomatoes as “tomatoes or pommes d’amour”. This is in reference to an old idea that tomatoes were aphrodisiacs but, given an English-language reader of this cookbook is unlikely to find tomatoes sold as pommes d’amour it does seem a tad pointless to allude to it.

More understandably, but also more annoyingly, some of the more unusual ingredients are sometimes given odd translations. In this case I think they did the best they could in choosing their preferred translation and acknowledging alternative ones in the introduction but nevertheless using, say, christophenes rather than chayotte is a non-trivial hindrance to actually finding ingredients and would have only been more of a problem in the pre-internet era in which the book was published. At least this isn’t a problem with breadfruit or jackfruit.

Overall I would say this cookbook is frustrating. But I also don’t think there’s much in the way of alternatives if you’re interested in this kind of food and are only literate in English. Mauritian food is distinctive and worth trying so I’d hesitantly recommend this book for experienced cooks, with an interest and with patience. Mostly for the lack of a more refined alternative and because of a strange fondness I feel for the book despite its many flaws. It’s still easy to find for cheap so if you want to roll the dice on it you shouldn’t end up too far out of pocket at least.