Serbian Cooking: Popular Recipes from the Balkan Region

I received a review copy of this cookbook in exchange for my review.  All opinions are my own.  This post contains affiliate links for Amazon; if you shop through them, a small commission supports this site at no cost to you.

Serbian Cooking: Popular Recipes from the Balkan Region

 

I’ll admit that Serbian cooking isn’t something that I know a lot about.  However, when Schiffer Books offered to send me one of several cookbooks for review, I picked Serbian Cooking: Popular Recipes from the Balkan Region.

Why?  Well, for one thing, I gravitate toward topics I don’t know about.  They give me a hunger to learn more; quite literally, in the case of cookbooks.

This cookbook reads like a family collection of recipes.  If you aren’t charmed by the acknowledgments, then you must have a heart of stone:

Thanks to my mom for cooking these fabulous meals and teaching me how to be a good cook … Thanks to my wonderful kids for inspiring the book and convincing me that “yellow” deserves to be in a cookbook.  You guys make me smile every day and remind me that life is like a recipe, a little of this and a little of that all mixed together makes something delicious.

So maybe the photos are not as elegant and saturated as you might see in the pages of Bon Appetit.  That’s beside the point.  These are family recipes, and they look like family recipes that you would see on the dinner table any given evening.  What makes them unique is that they are from a different culture than you might be used to- and that’s where their value lies.

I enjoyed paging through the recipes that were more familiar (baklava, strudel, potato salad) and those that were less familiar (plum dumplings, paprikash, potato pita).  If you’re interested in Eastern European cooking, Serbian Cooking: Popular Recipes from the Balkan Region might be just what you’re looking for.