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About the author
Naomi Duguid is a writer, photographer, traveler, and home cook. Her recent cookbook Taste of Persia is the winner of a James Beard Award, an IACP Cookbook Award, and a Taste Canada Award. Her book Burma: Rivers of Flavor is also an IACP Cookbook Award and Taste Canada Award winner. Her six previous award-winning titles, co-authored with Jeffrey Alford, include two now-classic cookbooks that won the James Beard Award for Cookbook of the Year: Flatbreads & Flavors: A Baker’s Atlas and Hot Sour Salty Sweet: A Culinary Journey Through Southeast Asia. Naomi leads small-group food-immersive trips to the Republic of Georgia and elsewhere. She is a Trustee of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, and is a frequent guest speaker and presenter at food conferences, particularly those focused on grains. She lives in Toronto. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter at @naomiduguid.
Summary
James Beard Award Finalist
“[A] mesmerizing mix of recipes and food history.”
—Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW
“Duguid has a scholar’s love of research, a cook’s hunger, and a journalist’s talent for storytelling. . . . The recipes are from all over the world and her knowledge is staggering. . . . Simply brilliant.”
—Diana Henry, The Telegraph (U.K.), The Best Cookbooks to Buy in Autumn 2022
Naomi Duguid, who’s taken food lovers to many corners of the globe, now invites readers and cooks on a very different journey—a deep dive into the miracle of salt and its essential role in preserving, fermenting, and transforming food.
Learn age-old techniques for making sauerkraut, miso, butter, prosciutto, kimchi, salt-fermented pickles, basturma, salt-preserved lemons, brined eggs, and much more. Create a vibrant “salt pantry” filled with enticing blends of salt and spices, and with easy condiments and preserves such as Spiced Green Mango Pickle and Dried Shrimp and Garlic Chutney. Read about essential salt-preserved flavorings such as soy sauce, fish sauce, pickled plums, salted anchovies, and salt cod.
The wide range of international recipes that follow invite you to use this umami-rich larder of salt-preserved ingredients and salted flavorings to transform vegetables, soups, mains, pasta dishes, and desserts. Orange and Black Olive Salad balances tangy and salty. Black Bean Sauce adds intense flavor to stir-fries. Bacalao Tortilla is a nod to salt cod as a cornerstone of European kitchens. Shio Koji, a simple salt-fermented ingredient, flavors grilled vegetables and other foods with subtlety and power. Kebabs marinated with a blend of pomegranate molasses and fish sauce are a triumph of salty-sweet-tart umami. And there’s nothing like a layer of saltiness to bring out the best in sweets and desserts, from Creamy Candied Ginger and Miso Ice Cream to Yogurt Cake with Salted Lemon and Nuts, from Breton Salted-Butter Cake to Miso Cookies with Dark Chocolate Chips.
Working with salt-preserved and salt-fermented ingredients not only opens up a rich new world of flavors and techniques but also offers cooks the gift of connecting with generations of culinary wisdom.
Foreword
Weaving together history, culinary science, and an expansive array of recipes, The Miracle of Salt is the first cookbook to explore the magic of salt in the global foodscape, from the beloved, innovative, James Beard Award–winning author Naomi Duguid.
