Product Description

Borrowing from cuisines around the world, Nicole Routhier presents dishes with fruits for every course. There are fruit and fruit-influenced starters: steamed shrimp with roasted pepper and apple dip and fruity bruschetta. Soups: Mexican lime soup, cream of fennel and pear soup. Salads: sicilian orange salad, tropical lobster salad. Entrees: pepper steak with plum ketchup, braised cranberry pork chops, lemon chicken. And, of course, desserts: sour cherry pie, blackberry-lime parfaits, best raspberry brownies. In addition, there are beverages, preserves and chutneys. There is also advice on how to buy and store fresh fruits.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #330986 in Books
• Published on: 1996-04-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Routhier (The Foods of Vietnam and Cooking Under Wraps) is a generous cookbook author. This outstanding compendium of dishes with fruit is not only packed with interesting, flavorful recipes, but sidebars and tips?on everything from best-taste combinations for a fruit-and-cheese board to working with chocolate? could almost stand alone as a second book. And all this guidance comes without clutter or filler. Drawn from many cultures, even the traditional recipes take an innovative edge. Rosy Baba Ghanoush is perked up with pomegranate juice and seeds. Shiitake mushrooms float atop Mom's Green Papaya Soup ("the Asian equivalent of Jewish chicken soup"); in Fruited Noodle Pudding, white wine and beaten egg whites stand in for sour cream. Routhier often brings tastes together in new combinations like Steak Salad with Blackberries, Grilled Tuna Steaks with Strawberry Salsa, and Iced Apple Tea with Apricots. Other recipes introduce unusual ingredients and/or techniques (always with meticulous instructions) such as Veal Scaloppine with Grapefruit, Festive Cactus Pear and Wine Jelly, and Tea-Smoked Baby Back Ribs with Tangerine Glaze. American cooks, many of whom are just learning how to make the most of vegetables, are well served by Routhier's authoritative guide to the unfrequented culinary world of fruits.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Here are 400-plus recipes using fruit in more ways than most cooks might think imaginable, from Roasted Pepper and Apple Dip to Lemon-Lime Spaghetti to Gratin of Red and Black Berries. Routhier is author of the acclaimed The Foods of Vietnam (Stewart, Tabori, & Chang, 1989) and a cooking teacher in New York City. The wide-ranging recipes reflect her Vietnamese-French heritage and her interest in a variety of cuisines. Some of the recipes are intriguing, others seem a bit contrived (Grilled Banana Pizza?), but the author's enthusiasm is contagious, and there are certainly lots of imaginative ideas here. Elizabeth Riely's A Feast of Fruits (LJ 6/15/93) and Rolce Payne and Dorrit Senior's Cooking with Fruit (LJ 3/15/92) provide more basic information on selection, storage, and so forth, but neither can match the number or diversity of Routhier's recipes. For most collections.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Ingram
Drawn from a wide range of international cuisines and combining traditional and innovative culinary approaches, a delectable fruit cookbook features four hundred imaginative recipes that use fruit for every course of the meal, from appetizer to dessert. Simultaneous. Tour.

Customer Reviews

Fruit for breakfast lunch and dinner
With nearly 500 pages of sweet and savory international recipes, with shopping and storing advice, descriptions of more exotic fruits, numerous tips for taste combinations, and a chart showing months of availability and peak seasons, this is a valuable volume for any fruit lover.

Author of the award-winning "The Foods of Vietnam," Routhier organizes this imaginative book by course. Starters include Raspberry-glazed Chicken Wings and Tex Mex Mussels with pineapple, tomato, cilantro salsa. The soups will interest more adventurous cooks (Mexican Lime; Clam Chowder made with pineapple juice and coconut milk). First course and main dish salads include Smoked Trout and Pear, two kinds of carrot salad, Scallops with Cantaloupe and Cucumber.

The Pasta & Grains chapter features Couscous with Dried Fruit and a kugel with apples and raisins. For sides try Baked Acorn Squash with Peach Butter, or Braised Red Cabbage with apples and raspberry vinegar.

For main courses there are Sauteed Chicken Breasts with Peaches or Grilled Chicken with Nectarine-Tomato Salsa, Orange-Glazed Flank Steaks or Braised Cranberry Pork Chops. There are desserts, of course, Raspberry Rhubarb Pie; Peach Cobbler, Three-Fruit Terrine with Banana Sauce.

Routhier also includes chapters of drinks and smoothies: (Raspberry Cooler, Strawberry Iced Tea), sorbets and ice creams, breakfasts (Sausage and Orange Marmalade Omelets, Cranberry Apple Corncakes, toast spreads like raspberry butter and blueberry-walnut spread) breads (Blueberry Banana Muffins, Strawberry Lemon Bread) and pantry items (Cherry Jam, Spiced Apricot Chutney, Fresh Plum Sauce, Blueberry Vinegar).

This is a comprehensive, informative guide to using fruits the year round and should be a must for any cook's well-stocked bookshelf.

Absolutely superb, a must for your kitchen!
A friend of mine was buying this particular book for another friend as a Christmas gift. He was asking my advice, since I do far more around the kitchen than he; was it a good enough book for a fellow kitchen-dweller? Well, after a brief examination and a flip-through, I gave him the okay and snuck off to buy a copy for myself! What an incredible book!

For those of you who are visually inclined, the bad news is, there are no pictures in this book. However, that is greatly outweighed by the sheer amount of recipes, tips, and useful information. There are notes about fruits (obviously) and many more about non-fruit foods (not quite so obvious). For example, in the meats section, there is a great tip on cooking and preparing pork products.

The recipes range from original and well-found, to the similar and familiar, to the exotic and delightful, and of course the stand-by fruit recipes that are so essential (i.e. jams, jellies, spreads, and the like).

If you are a kitchen-dweller, too, or know someone who loves to cook, with or without fruit, this is a must-have. Oh, let's be serious, this book is a must-have for any kitchen. Make no mistake, this book is loaded with facts and incredible recipes, some that will do in a pinch for quick dinners, some that can assist in preparing that Sunday feast. A superior buy and a necessary addition to any kitchen library!