For two years Lukins tasted her way through 33 countries, returning home periodically to work out recipes while the flavors were fresh in her memory. “My intention was to get the best foods of the world, and then come home and dream about them in my own kitchen-using ingredients from the supermarket,” she says. The new book is crammed with 450 recipes, plus menus, tips, snapshots, fists, drawings and mini-essays evoking room-service breakfasts, spice markets, wild mushrooms, Indian chutneys and more. How many cookbooks devote a page to Carmen Miranda, inspired by a visit to the Carmen Miranda Museum in Rio? “I love Carmen Miranda,” says Lukins. “My mother used to sing ‘Cuanto le Gusta.’ You should see this museum!” For readers it all makes an exhilarating voyage-not precisely to Spain, Tunisia, Sweden or Argentina, for this is no scholarly survey, but into the imagination of a great cook and a perpetually hungry traveler.
Lukins, 51, came away from the work of the past few years with more than a cookbook. “I got my fife back,” she says. in December 1991, she suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage and spent the next two months in the hospital and a rehabilitative center. “I was paralyzed on the left side,” she says. “Boy. did that stink. I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t dress myself, I couldn’t read, I couldn’t tell time.” Once home, greatly though not completely recovered, she insisted on returning to work. “My biggest fear was that I wouldn’t finish the book,” she says. “So I went to Martinique and Jamaica. because I wanted to learn how to make jerk sauce.” Traveling with the help of her husband or her assistant, Laurie Griffith, she found new and unpleasant challenges on the road. “I couldn’t climb stairs. I’d see a flight of stairs and I’d cry” Today she still walks with a slight limp, but there are few other signs of her illness, apart from a palpable gratitude for what she calls “the second half of my life.”
Despite an impressive track record-the three books she coauthored with her former Silver Palate partner, juice Rosso, have nearly 5 million copies in print-Lukins says she’s nervous about how critics may respond to “All Around the World.” Last year Rosso published her first solo cookbook, “Great Good Food,” a huge compendium of low-fat recipes. it sold more than 400,000 copies, but some critics (including this one) bashed it for sloppiness, citing recipes that either didn’t work or tasted terrible. Lukins and Rosso are no longer friends-they grew apart in the late ’80s and quit collaborating after “The New Basics Cookbook” was published in 1989. But Lukins fears getting similarly trashed. “I’ve been very frightened that everyone would say, ‘OK, they’ve been famous long enough, let’s get her, too’.”
But the difference between the two post-Silver Palate books is immense. Lukins was always described as the food expert in the duo; Rosso was said to be the marketing genius. Sure enough, while Rosso’s book frantically chases a trend, Lukins’s concentrates on the imaginative,-%veil-constructed recipes for which the Silver Palate books were famous. “I would never in 20 million years do a low-fat cookbook,” says Lukins. “It has nothing to do with food.”
“All Around the World” has everything to do with food. The recipes work so smoothly, and with such gratifying results, that even a pedestrian cook gets the chance to feel spectacularly talented in the kitchen. For Spanakopita, a Greek savory pie usually made with spinach, she suggests dandelion greens and chard instead. It’s a change perfectly in keeping with Greek eating habits, and makes a scrumptious dish. Jamaican Gingerbread? No, Lukins doesn’t claim to have gotten the recipe from islanders lounging around under coconut palms enjoying the quintessential New England dessert. But as she notes in the book, the molasses, cloves, ginger and other flavors conjure sunnier shores than Boston’s. Most important, the spices and sweetenings are so well chosen and balanced that this gingerbread is distinctive by any standard.
Though it’s firmly in the Silver Palate tradition, ‘All Around the World" is better than its predecessors. The food is less fussy, and the tone is more genuinely personal. “I don’t tell people, ‘Go fly kites at a picnic’ or ‘Sing carols at an old folks’ home in your bathrobes’ any more,” says Lukins. “I’ve gotten much more grown-up. This is a totally different cookbook, and it’s who I am. This book is from my heart.”
