Burma: Rivers of Flavor: A Cookbook

By Naomi Duguid

The fact is, some books simply need to exist. Burma: The Cookbook is one of these. Burma is culturally rich and complex in many ways, but perhaps nowhere more than in its extraordinary food culture. It's at the crossroads between the food of the great Indian subcontinent (to its west) and the food of Southeast Asia (to its east), with a dash of Chinese influence (from the north), making it an amazing place in-between. With simple recipes for food that manages to be elegant and earthy at the same time, plus stories of a place and a people that inspired Rudyard Kipling, Somerset Maugham, and George Orwell, this may be Duguid's most enchanting cookbook yet. The book features photographs throughout--of the finished dishes, of people, of a hauntingly beautiful land--as well as travel tips, a history of Burma, extensive glossaries, and a bibliography.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Nov 27, 2012
• ISBN: 9780307362179

Naomi Duguid

Naomi Duguid is a writer, photographer, traveler, and home cook. Her most recent cookbooks, Burma and Taste of Persia, transported readers into cultures and flavors not yet celebrated in the West, and respectively won the 2013 IACP Cookbook Award for Culinary Travel and both the 2017 IACP Cookbook Award for Culinary Travel and the 2017 James Beard Award for Best Book of the Year, International. Her six previous award-winning titles, coauthored 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.

Reviews for Burma

[bookswoman · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I've always been fascinated by Orson Welles. His larger than life career with the tragedy of being banned from Hollywood because of Citizen Kane just seems to play out like a movie of its own.

This book is very different from every other book written by or about Welles. His oldest daughter, Christopher, tells the story of her life and how she tried through the years to remain in his life. Not an easy task as her father and mother divorced when she was very young with Virginia remarrying twice, as did Orson. Orson also had two more daughters, Rebecca with Rita Hayworth and Beatrice with Paola, an Italian Princess. Chris has to compete with wives and other daughters as well as a storied career for any attention she was to get from her famous (or infamous) father. Life was complicated by the fact that Virginia showed classic signs of depression and worked hard at times to keep the two apart, while at other times seemed to work just as hard to have them maintain a relationship.

There is no "storybook" ending to this story, although Chris and Orson eventually reached a point where their relationship was friendly and they were able to converse as adults. All in all it is a fascinating look at Orson Welles, the man - not the movie maker.

[jeb5 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A stunning autobiography written by Orson Welles' eldest daughter, Christopher! Through her memories, stories, pictures, and letters both her life and her father's come to life on the page. She writes of how her father's absence affected her life and also how the moments they shared impacted her in lasting ways. It is a heart-wrenching tale of a daughter's desire to see her father proud of her, of her struggles to be near him, to deal with his absence, to overcome his death, and finally, to come into herself. Through her autobiography we are able to see the man behind "Citizen Kane" and "Othello"; she has separated the Hollywood man from the artist and genius. A masterpiece of autobiographical writing!