Sweet Nature: A Cook's Guide to Using Honey and Maple Syrup
A beautiful, delicious celebration of two natural sweeteners in irresistible recipes
Honey and maple syrup might be better for you than sugar. They might be better for the environment. But even better, and sweet as anything, is how these natural ingredients taste and the wonders they do for a dish. James Beard Award-winning cookbook author Beth Dooley and gifted photographer Mette Nielsen make the most of these flavors in this celebration of honey and maple syrup in traditional kitchens as well as cutting-edge food culture.
Full of easy ideas that include honey and maple syrup in foods both savory and sweet, this book features a wide range of irresistible recipes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, for snacks and salads, condiments and vegetables, entrées and desserts, syrups, cocktails, and elixirs. Sweeten your table with rosemary honey butter, green tomato chutney, curry marinated herring, brown butter honey popcorn, savory maple black pepper biscotti, oven-roasted chicken thighs with pomegranate molasses, honey-glazed salmon salad, maple vanilla half-pound cake, elderberry throat coat, bourbon maple smash, and more.
With its innovative recipes, practical tips, conversion charts, historical and scientific facts, information on nutritional value, suggestions for storage and sourcing, and above all Mette Nielsen's remarkable photographs, Sweet Nature invites us to fully enjoy these two iconic ingredients from nature's pantry.
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Beth Dooley is a James Beard Award-winning author and coauthor of several cookbooks, including Savoring the Seasons of the Northern Heartland, The Northern Heartland Kitchen, Minnesota's Bounty, The Birchwood Cafe Cookbook, Savory Sweet, and The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen (Best American Cookbook, James Beard Award, 2018), all from Minnesota. In Winter's Kitchen is her memoir about finding her place in the Midwestern food scene. She lives in Minneapolis.
Mette Nielsen's photographs have illustrated numerous books, newspapers, and magazines. A talented master gardener, she created the edible garden for the Birchwood Cafe in Minneapolis, collaborated on The Birchwood Cafe Cookbook and Minnesota's Bounty, and coauthored Savory Sweet.
"Sweet Nature celebrates the gifts of maple syrup and honey in one hundred easy-to-make recipes bursting with global flavors, from fermented hot chili sauce to citrus maple-cured salmon. Its brilliant pairings of sweet and savory carry you from hearty breakfasts to invigorating midday snacks to comforting nightcaps. This joyous cookbook is sure to sweeten your day."--Darra Goldstein, founding editor of Gastronomica and author of Fire + Ice: Classic Nordic Cooking
"To have Beth Dooley's words and Mette Nielsen's photography in one book is nothing short of pure gold. Vibrant, informative, and chock-full of scintillating recipes, this book is sweet in more ways than one. The recipes are inviting, more so with mouth-watering photographs, and peppered with great information throughout. It's a must-have on the kitchen shelf."--Raghavan Iyer, author of six books and winner of Emmy, James Beard, and IACP awards
"Dooley aims to educate readers about the ways to use honey and maple syrup beyond the 100-plus recipes she includes here. Almost every dish features one of the following: a sweet tip about, say, substitutes or variations; a sidebar, about sugar maples or the endangered honey bee, among other topics; or quick ideas, such as the appropriate pairings for three different colors of maple syrup (a dark color goes well with coffee and aged cheeses, while gold complements pork and shellfish)."--Booklist, starred review
"Sweet Nature is a beautifully written and illustrated cookbook with a regional emphasis. It provides an abundance of reasons for stocking more maple and honey in the pantry and more maple trees and honey bees in our neighborhoods." --Foreword Reviews "[Dooley and Nielsen's] latest cookbook, Sweet Nature, continues their fascination with locally raised foods. Page after beautifully illustrated page illuminates the virtues of honey and maple syrup, finding ingenious, boundary-pushing ways of incorporating the two sweeteners into a wide range of recipes." --Rick Nelson, Star Tribune "While this cookbook is as much a feast for the eyes as it is for the stomach, it's more than that. The authors have included all sorts of useful information such as practical tips, conversion charts, historical and scientific facts, and suggestions for storage and sourcing." --Hutchinson Leader
