Windmills in My Oven: A Book of Dutch Baking »

Sugar, spice, and all things nice: what say you to cookies, tarts, pies, cakes, flans, gingerbread, wafers, waffles and pancakes? Dutch baking has them all: it mines the mother-lodes of comfort, luxury and temptation to devastating effect. This book explores the history and customs of the Dutch bakehouse while offering excellent recipes well-suited to the modern kitchen. There is no better teatime treat than GaitriAes spiced apple tart. The breads and cakes are simply delicious, the stuff of many a childhood dream; and the biscuits are crisp, rich and buttery. If you eat cookies (rather than biscuits) with your morning coffee you are plugging into a great tradition of baking, for cookie is originally a Dutch word, which crossed the Atlantic with settlers taking their biscuits, cakes, tarts and breads with them. Because of Holland's long history of trade and exploration in the East Indies, these recipes are heady with the aromas of the spice bazaar. And the wafers, waffles, loaves and other delicacies are often loaded with a rich tradition of local preferences and folk custom. Gaitri explains many of these, showing to perfection how cookery can be a way of understanding just as potent as the driest, most scholarly thesis. Then you can eat and enjoy the results. The text is in ten sections, each has an historical introduction and places the particular type of cake or bread in the context of everyday life. Gaitri Pagrach-Chandra is Guyanese by birth, but has lived in Holland for much of her life since university. As a wife and mother, and a student of history, she has the ideal qualifications for writing this book. And she has illustrated it with her own photographs of life andcookery in her home and the towns and villages around.