Nancy Harmon Jenkins - The New Mediterranean Diet Cookbook : a Delicious Alternative for Lifelong Health

THE NEW MEDITERRANEAN DIET COOKBOOK
A Bantam Book

PUBLISHING HISTORY
The Mediterranean Diet Cookbook hardcover edition published June 1994
The New Mediterranean Diet Cookbook / January 2009

Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York

All rights reserved
Copyright 1994, 2009 by Nancy Harmon Jenkins
The Mediterranean Diet Pyramid copyright 2000 by
Oldways Preservation & Exchange Trust

Book design by Ralph Fowler

Bantam Books and the Rooster colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jenkins, Nancy Harmon

The new Mediterranean diet cookbook: a delicious alternative for lifelong health / Nancy Harmon Jenkins; with a foreword by Marion Nestle.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-345-53614-3
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Cookery, Mediterranean. 2. DietMediterranean Region.
3. Low-fat dietRecipes. I. Title.

TX725.M35 J46 2009 2008040982
641.59182/2 22

www.bantamdell.com

v3.1

A LSO BY N ANCY H ARMON J ENKINS

Cucina del Sole
The Essential Mediterranean
Flavors of Tuscany
Flavors of Puglia
The Mediterranean Diet Cookbook
The Boat Beneath the Pyramid

The United States poet laureate Charles Simic

was asked by a New York Times reporter early in 2008

what he might advise people who are

looking to be happy.

For starters, the poet laureate said,

learn how to cook.

Good advice!

For Nadir
and the future

My deepest thanks go to Christopher Speed, who agreed to be my chief nutrition consultant for this book, and who has doggedly and determinedly helped me thread my way through the mysteries of antioxidants, phytochemicals, fatty acids, glycemic loads, and other arcane aspects of nutrition, diet, and health. My hat goes off to anyone who can keep all those n-numbers straight, and that also includes Antonia Trichopoulou of the University of Athens (Greece) Medical School and her husband Dimitri Trichopoulos of the Harvard School of Public Health, who jointly provided the meticulous outline of the Mediterranean diet on ; Marion Nestle of the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University, who has done so much to push Americans in the right direction as far as their eating habits are concerned, and who graciously provided the Foreword for this edition; and Frank Sachs, Eric Rimm, Walter Willett, and their many colleagues at the Harvard School of Public Health who, largely through a remarkable series of encounters at the Culinary Institute of America in California, introduced me to new ideas and theories and elaborated on old ones.

And speaking of the CIA (the food one, that is), I also want to acknowledge Greg Drescher, Executive Director of Strategic Initiatives at that organization, and his role in channeling Oldways Preservation & Exchange Trust, of which he was then a director, toward the initial Mediterranean diet work. Together with Dun Gifford, Greg labored mightily to gain recognition for the importance of diet in general, and the Mediterranean diet in particular. Under their leadership, Oldways was instrumental in bringing together scientists, journalists, chefs, and concerned members of the public to discuss these issues. At the CIA, Greg continues to work closely with institutions like the Harvard School of Public Health to promote greater understanding of the importance of a healthy diet. The CIA/HSPH annual conference, World of Healthy Flavors, is a landmark occasion for that.

My agent, David Black, was admirable in his pursuit of my dream of updating this book, fifteen years after the first edition, for which I thank him mightily, and I thank him too for finding me exactly the right editor at Bantam, Beth Rashbaum, who had never before taken on a food book and turned out to be every writers fantasy editorattentive, intelligent, quick to respond, quick to act, full of good ideas, lots of fun to work with, and, like my agent, with a fine palate to boot.

Finally, the book would simply not have happened without the constant attention of two essential peoplefaithful recipe tester Pam Elliott, who appeared on my front porch at the oddest times of the day with the oddest kind of something for me to taste yet another time until we got it right; and my equally faithful assistant Martha Lohnes, who searched, filed, photocopied, faxed, paid bills, traced recalcitrant contractors, boxed, hauled, mailed, took out the garbage, and looked after the dog while I roamed the Mediterranean having fun.

As is usual with a book of this nature, many, many other people had a hand in what success it may claimanonymous chefs, growers, and food producers, in Europe and the U.S., who showed me new ways with recipes or ingredients, as well as old friends and family members who accompanied me on my travels all around the Mediterranean and waited patiently while I negotiated yet another detail. To all of you, everywhere, my deepest thanks.

Nancy Harmon Jenkins
Teverina di Cortona
May 2008

When Nancy Jenkinss Mediterranean Cookbook first appeared in 1994, it was distinguished not only by the gorgeous writing but also by its then revolutionary approach to eating healthfully. Eat, she told us, as the Greeks and Southern Italians have done since ancient times, and you might live as healthfully and long as they do. By this, she meant a largely plant-based dietone with lots of fruits and vegetables, small amounts of meat, fish, and dairy products, with olive oil as the principal fat, and accompanied by a glass of wine. This diet, based on foods grown in the region surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, has been consumed since ancient times.

Its discovery as a health-promoting diet pattern, however, began only after World War II when investigators from Rockefeller University went to the island of Crete to try to figure out why its people, although existing under conditions of extreme poverty, were unusually healthy and long-lived. If they survived early childhood, their longevity was the highest in the world, rivaled only by the Japanese. Subsequent researchers concluded that one could hardly eat a healthier diet than that consumed by the people of Crete and Naples in the early 1950s.

Americans, however, did not really discover the Mediterranean diet until 40 years later when two groups with vested interests in promoting consumption of its distinct componentsparticularly olive oilrealized that its health benefits could be used as a basis for marketing. Oldways Preservation & Exchange Trust and the International Olive Oil Council (IOOC), a trade association formed under the auspices of the United Nations, began sponsoring conferences on traditional dietary patterns in the early 1990s. These meetings, often held in olive-growing countries, brought together food writers, chefs, restaurateurs, and academics to learn about Mediterranean foods and ingredients, and their separate and collective health benefits. I met Nancy Jenkins at one of these meetings in 1990, co-chaired (with Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health) the first international conference on diets of the Mediterranean in 1993, and edited a collection of papers presented at that conference for a special supplement to the