Mediterranean Clay Pot Cooking: Traditional and Modern Recipes to Savor and Share

By Paula Wolfert
Wiley, $34.95, 352 pages

Paula Wolfert, author of several previous cookbooks on Mediterranean cooking, has taken much of her expertise and focused it on the art of cooking in clay pots. While there are numerous variations of clay cooking pots, she focuses on just a few, and provides recipes from around the Mediterranean for each. Many can even be produced in a standard Crockpot, but will lose the “earthiness” that Wolfert finds clay, stone or earthenware can impart to recipes. One of the upsides to cooking in a pot is, often, most of the meal cooks all at one time; the downside is that many of the recipes are involved and require some time in prep. Nor are many of them easy for beginners. A case in point would be the Pork Daube with Wild Mushrooms, which requires preparing the pork on a skillet, and baking the final dish twice. The good news is that for the patient cook, these dishes will provide a taste of Mediterranean cooking at its freshest and most flavorful. The book is mostly black and white pages of recipes and commentary, with several pages of inset color photos of some of the final dishes. There is also an excellent section on finding and caring for clay pots of all sorts and an afterword with sources for the many pots and ingredient discussed, and a two page bibliography for cooks interested in further explorations of Mediterranean cooking.