Black Sea: Dispatches and Recipes Through Darkness and Light

The Black Sea, writes Caroline Eden, "offers waterways and land routes leading east to China; south, to the Middle East and the Mediterranean; west, to Eastern Europe; and north, to the Baltic Sea." And if Americans and Western Europeans have overlooked its cuisine, it has been to our loss.

A journalist and the author of the earlier Samarkand, Eden carefully paints a vivid portrait of the cities and regions she features, weaving thousands of years of history into her accounts of the lands where Jason sought the Golden Fleece and Tzar Nicholas II, last of the Romanovs, was feasted by the first King of Romania.

Her choice of recipes always reinforces the stories she tells about past and present, detailing the background of the Jewish enclave in Odessa, the district of Istanbul whose name translates as "tea field," and the football madness gripping ancient Trabzon, a city settled in the 7th century BCE.

As much travelogue as cookbook, this compelling and enchanting.

Hardcover. Color photographs throughout.