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Elysian Kitchens: Recipes Inspired by the Traditions and Tastes of the World's Sacred Spaces
A WBUR Hear & Now Best Cookbook of 2024
A lushly photographed cookbook showcasing the intersection of culture, spirituality, and cuisine. Elysian Kitchens bridges diverse beliefs, weaving a modern tapestry of faiths and histories in 100 time-tested recipes.
Monasteries, temples, mosques, and synagogues have long been centers of culinary innovation. No mere relics of the past, they reflect our modern world and are as dynamic and fundamental to our society as they ever were.
Granted rare access to closely guarded religious sanctuaries, Jody Eddy demonstrates how the monastic culinary philosophy can be adopted by any home cook or professional chef interested in integrating sustainable, time-honored cooking practices into their daily lives. Her 100 recipes include dumplings (momos) inspired by the cooking of monks at Thikse, a Buddhist temple in Ladakh, India, nestled in the Himalayas. From Kylemore Abbey, in Connemara, Ireland, she brings instructions for cooking Lamb Burgers with Creamy Red Cabbage Slaw and Rosemary Aioli as the nuns do, with enough leftover sauce to drizzle over smoked salmon bagels the next day. From a Jewish community in Brooklyn, New York, come time-tested kosher recipes, including Potato Kugel and Matzo Ball Soup. Ginger and Ginkgo Nut Stuffed Cabbage Rolls illustrate Zen Buddhist cooking from Eihei-ji in Japan. In Morocco, she finds a Sufi chicken and olive tajine recipe that makes for a perfect dinner. And for dessert, Panellets (tiny sugar-and-almond cookies), courtesy of an 1100-year-old Spanish monastery.
A global story of cooking across communities, Elysian Kitchens contributes to the most important conversations taking place in the food world today by examining a gastronomic heritage that has until now been virtually unexplored. This is a cookbook for anyone eager to discover the traditions of magnificently beautiful, endlessly compelling places that embody the wisdom of the ages and offer the promise of a more optimistic and sustainable future.
A lushly photographed cookbook showcasing the intersection of culture, spirituality, and cuisine. Elysian Kitchens bridges diverse beliefs, weaving a modern tapestry of faiths and histories in 100 time-tested recipes.
Monasteries, temples, mosques, and synagogues have long been centers of culinary innovation. No mere relics of the past, they reflect our modern world and are as dynamic and fundamental to our society as they ever were.
Granted rare access to closely guarded religious sanctuaries, Jody Eddy demonstrates how the monastic culinary philosophy can be adopted by any home cook or professional chef interested in integrating sustainable, time-honored cooking practices into their daily lives. Her 100 recipes include dumplings (momos) inspired by the cooking of monks at Thikse, a Buddhist temple in Ladakh, India, nestled in the Himalayas. From Kylemore Abbey, in Connemara, Ireland, she brings instructions for cooking Lamb Burgers with Creamy Red Cabbage Slaw and Rosemary Aioli as the nuns do, with enough leftover sauce to drizzle over smoked salmon bagels the next day. From a Jewish community in Brooklyn, New York, come time-tested kosher recipes, including Potato Kugel and Matzo Ball Soup. Ginger and Ginkgo Nut Stuffed Cabbage Rolls illustrate Zen Buddhist cooking from Eihei-ji in Japan. In Morocco, she finds a Sufi chicken and olive tajine recipe that makes for a perfect dinner. And for dessert, Panellets (tiny sugar-and-almond cookies), courtesy of an 1100-year-old Spanish monastery.
A global story of cooking across communities, Elysian Kitchens contributes to the most important conversations taking place in the food world today by examining a gastronomic heritage that has until now been virtually unexplored. This is a cookbook for anyone eager to discover the traditions of magnificently beautiful, endlessly compelling places that embody the wisdom of the ages and offer the promise of a more optimistic and sustainable future.
384 pages, Hardcover
Published October 15, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 1, 2025
If you view this purely as a cookbook, it is an eclectic collection of recipes from the kitchens of monasteries, abbeys and other religious houses from around the world that are fairly representative of the common foods eaten at the geographical locations they were collected from. But the intent of the book is more than just a cookbook, what the author is attempting, through her research on culinary traditions and contemporary cooking practices at religious sanctuaries, is to show the intersection between spirituality, culture and cuisine.
Recipes are well-written and while photos of the finished dished are very sparse, the book is full of artful pictures from the locales where they were derived from. What was most surprising was the ordinariness of the foods served, like poutine at the Canadian Abbey or paella at the Spanish Monastery. Despite this, it was interesting gaining a glimpse inside the kitchens of places we don't often have access to.
Recipes are well-written and while photos of the finished dished are very sparse, the book is full of artful pictures from the locales where they were derived from. What was most surprising was the ordinariness of the foods served, like poutine at the Canadian Abbey or paella at the Spanish Monastery. Despite this, it was interesting gaining a glimpse inside the kitchens of places we don't often have access to.
January 22, 2025
Interesting that opinions on this book have ranged so widely so far. I enjoyed it and would like to own a copy someday--but I'm gonna wait until it's a little older and I can get a copy cheaper :)
The monasteries profiled range across faiths, continents, and profile--some are tourist destinations, others are remote and virtually inaccessible. What they share is an interest in food as spiritual nourishment for individual adherents, the monastery, and its community. They see food preparation and eating together as spiritual acts to be fully embraced, not just something that must be done to keep the monks and nuns alive so they can focus on "higher" spiritual matters.
These are not monasteries where ascetic diets are followed (except maybe on specific fast days or something like that). These recipes are not "gourmet," but they are varied even for individual monasteries. Even if the folks at a particular monastery eat relatively simply, they take advantage of local, seasonal ingredients (often grown themselves) and home-grown expertise (including not just food prep but beekeeping, cheese-making, beer-brewing, etc.) to feed their members well. Most of the recipes seem like normal recipes you would find in a "global" cookbook, not special "monastery food."
As a Minnesotan (as is the author), I was amused to find that St. John's Abbey in Collegeville is among the monasteries profiled, including such "exotic," "global" recipes as wild rice casserole, bratwurst and sauerkraut, and Swedish meatballs :) The recipes from Abbaye de Saint-Benoit-du-Lac in Quebec also sounded familiar.
The main things I disliked about the book were:
- Not every recipe had a photo of the dish. In fact, I would say only a minority did. Especially given that much of the food is unfamiliar, I'm much more likely to want to cook it if it looks delicious, and if I know what I'm aiming for.
- As you might expect from recipes from around the world, many call for obscure ingredients, although Eddy does her best to suggest substitutions (and clarify where you need the real thing).
The monasteries profiled range across faiths, continents, and profile--some are tourist destinations, others are remote and virtually inaccessible. What they share is an interest in food as spiritual nourishment for individual adherents, the monastery, and its community. They see food preparation and eating together as spiritual acts to be fully embraced, not just something that must be done to keep the monks and nuns alive so they can focus on "higher" spiritual matters.
These are not monasteries where ascetic diets are followed (except maybe on specific fast days or something like that). These recipes are not "gourmet," but they are varied even for individual monasteries. Even if the folks at a particular monastery eat relatively simply, they take advantage of local, seasonal ingredients (often grown themselves) and home-grown expertise (including not just food prep but beekeeping, cheese-making, beer-brewing, etc.) to feed their members well. Most of the recipes seem like normal recipes you would find in a "global" cookbook, not special "monastery food."
As a Minnesotan (as is the author), I was amused to find that St. John's Abbey in Collegeville is among the monasteries profiled, including such "exotic," "global" recipes as wild rice casserole, bratwurst and sauerkraut, and Swedish meatballs :) The recipes from Abbaye de Saint-Benoit-du-Lac in Quebec also sounded familiar.
The main things I disliked about the book were:
- Not every recipe had a photo of the dish. In fact, I would say only a minority did. Especially given that much of the food is unfamiliar, I'm much more likely to want to cook it if it looks delicious, and if I know what I'm aiming for.
- As you might expect from recipes from around the world, many call for obscure ingredients, although Eddy does her best to suggest substitutions (and clarify where you need the real thing).
June 9, 2025
I don't cook and this isn't a review of the recipes, but the stories were very interesting. I particularly enjoyed Frere Pierre as a Canadian myself.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews