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Healthy Latin Cooking: 200 Sizzling Recipes from Mexico, Cuba, the Caribbean, Brazil, and Beyond
By Steven Raichlen
Rodale Press
410 pp $19.95

Mediterranean Light
By Martha Rose Shulman
William Morrow Publishing
424 pp $18

Caribbean Light: All the Flavor of the Islands, Without All the Fat
By Donna Shields
Doubleday
324 pp $25.95

My skepticism about low-fat cooking dates back to a dinner many years ago, when I presented my family with a low-fat lemon mousse. The mousse tasted soapy enough to use to wash the dinner plates afterwards, and 10 years later it's still rare that we get through a holiday without someone teasing me about the fiasco. I learned my lesson, and I think they did too: Beware of recipes that bill themselves as healthy -- they'll probably taste healthy too.

Hundreds of health-oriented cookbooks are published annually, accommodating a variety of ailments, diets, and cuisines. Unfortunately, many of these efforts resemble my lemon mousse debacle by sacrificing too much flavor for the sake of health. Rarely does a recipe that's originally high in fat, such as Creme Brulee, taste anything but disappointing when its calories have been slashed. As sad as it is, carob doesn't taste like chocolate, margarine doesn't taste like butter, and egg substitute is a poor replacement for eggs when it comes to flavor.

But while these fundamental verities may seem disheartening to the would-be dieter, they don't need to be. Fortunately, it is possible to trim fat and sodium in some of the best cuisines in the world and still deliver something exotic.

Three new cookbooks, Healthy Latin Cooking, Mediterranean Light, and Caribbean Light, all shave off fat by using similar tactics, such as cutting down on oil, baking or grilling instead of frying, cooking with nonstick pans, and emphasizing meatless dishes or lighter meats, such as fish and chicken. As these books suggest, the secret is to focus on regional dishes that offer high flavor, low-fat ingredients, and then perform minimal changes to make the recipes even healthier.

Sporting dozens of color photographs and loads of regional history and nutritional information, Steven Raichlen's Healthy Latin Cooking is one of the most impressive low-fat cookbooks on the market. Raichlen is a devotee of Latin American cooking and makes a strong case that despite its reputation for being high in fat (a notion based on such north-of-the-border favorites as beef burritos and empanadas), traditional Latin American cuisine can be an excellent foundation for a healthy diet.

Raichlen is the author of over 20 books, including a popular grilling guide called The Barbecue Bible and the cookbook series High-Flavor, Low Fat published by Viking. In Healthy Latin Cooking, he focuses on traditional, healthy dishes, such as Pork in Oaxacan Mole and Peruvian Seafood Stew, and makes subtle changes to keep fat and cholesterol to a minimum. So you can see the benefits in figures, each recipe is accompanied by before-and-after levels of calories, total fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol.

Eliminating too much fat at the expense of flavor would be self-defeating, so Raichlen tells you to add "fat where you can taste it." Lard, a traditional ingredient throughout much of Latin America, is present in a number of the dishes, but at a fraction of the amount called for in the more traditional recipe, and healthier still, olive oil is used throughout the book.

Dishes are fairly straightforward in preparation -- many can be made in less than 30 minutes -- and most ingredients listed are easy to find. Most important, the results are almost always impressive. The Shrimp Stew was a simple, pleasing dish that took about 20 minutes to make, and the Snapper in Veracruz-style Spicy Tomato Sauce cuts enough oil to produce a complex, unusual entree that has almost a third less fat than the already healthy traditional dish. There were some clunkers. I was underwhelmed by the Guacamole recipe, and the 15 red peppers required for the Chicken Enchiladas With Red Sauce made the dish too fiery for my taste. But with its wealth of information about Latin American cuisine, Healthy Latin Cooking is a good addition to any chef's library.

At first glance, Martha Rose Shulman's Mediterranean Light seems the antithesis of Healthy Latin Cooking. Save for the rather pedestrian cover photograph, there are no illustrations at all, and unlike the writing in Healthy Latin Cooking, her descriptions often fail to excite. Fortunately, Mediterranean Light's recipes turn out to be much more impressive on the plate than on the page.

While many "Mediterranean" cookbooks dwell on the cuisines of southern Europe, Shulman covers the whole Mediterranean basin, including many standards from Italy, Spain, and Greece as well as Northern Africa and the Middle East. In an unusual approach, Shulman does not include any recipes for beef, lamb, or pork. Instead, she tries to coax carnivores with fish, chicken, and rabbit recipes. When a dish requires a hearty taste, she adds vegetables that deliver a meaty flavor, such as eggplant or mushrooms.

Preparation and ingredients are quite manageable, and each recipe includes a nutritional breakdown, but as the cook will soon find, the dishes are first and foremost made to taste good. The steps for Fish Stew From Southern Italy looked as plain as the entree's name, but what came off of the stove in less than an hour was astonishingly tasty. And the recipe for Hummus, which replaces more than two-thirds of the olive oil and tahini with low-fat yogurt, is exceptional.

Shulman uses simple techniques such as cutting back on oil, baking instead of frying, and even substituting low-fat yogurt for oil. But as Steven Raichlen did in Healthy Latin Cooking, she has chosen recipes that derive most of their flavor from healthy ingredients, so there is not a lot of need for fussing with the original preparations.

While Raichlen touches on the foods of the Caribbean in Healthy Latin Cooking, Donna Shields does a far better job of communicating the spirit of the cuisine in her cookbook, Caribbean Light. Shields draws on recipes from 20 different countries but sticks to ingredients that are easy to find.

The dishes are a mix of traditional recipes and Shields' own creations using the exotic ingredients that typify Caribbean cuisine, such as Scotch Bonnet Peppers, mangoes, and star anise. The book is sprinkled with informative sidebars about the dishes' ingredients, cooking techniques, and regional history, and each recipe is accompanied by a nutritional analysis. Like Shulman and Raichlen, Shields is a fan of olive oil's health benefits, and she substitutes it liberally for the butter and coconut oil that is used throughout the Caribbean. Although some dishes do use fatty ingredients such as chorizo and cream, Shields, a registered dietition, points out that "a little goes a long way."

Seafood, slow-cooked meats and other unusual ingredients show up in places you never thought you'd find them -- don't scream when you see Worcestershire sauce in the Honeydew Syrup. There are also a number of unusual spice rubs, sauces, and desserts. The excellent Jamaican Jerk Chicken, one of the only recipes that most people will recognize, uses an unusual ingredient in the paste: mango. These dishes are probably the most exotic found in any of the three cookbooks, but the ingredients are easily available and the recipes are straightforward in preparation.

All three of these cookbooks do an impressive job of focusing on foods that can be easily doctored to fit a healthy diet without much effect on flavor. And as a result, my faith in low-fat cooking has been restored. Although the ill-fated lemon mousse may have left a scar, I'll bet these books could restore my family's faith too.

-- Eben Gillette is a freelance writer based in San Francisco.

Fish Stew From Southern Italy
(makes 4 servings)
From Martha Rose Shulman's Mediterranean Light

1 tablespoon olive oil
3 large garlic cloves, minced
2 medium unpeeled potatoes, sliced
1 1/2 pounds fresh or canned tomatoes (with juice), peeled and chopped
1 small bunch parsley, chopped
1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon hot pepper flakes (to taste; optional)
salt
1/2 cup dry white wine
4 large thin steaks (about 6 ounces each) grouper or other firm-fleshed fish
freshly ground pepper

Heat the olive oil in a large heavy-bottomed casserole and saute the garlic over medium-low heat until golden. Add potatoes, tomatoes, parsley, hot pepper flakes, and some salt. Bring to a simmer and cook, stirring, for 20 minutes or until potatoes are tender. Add the white wine and simmer another five minutes. Add the fish steaks and cook for five to 10 minutes, until they are cooked through. Season to taste with more salt and pepper to taste. To serve, place a piece of fish on each plate and spoon the sauce over it.

Calories: 231
Fat: 6 grams
Sodium: 116 milligrams
Protein: 35 grams
Carbohydrates: 10 grams
Cholesterol: 63 milligrams

Last updated August 18, 2009
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