Soup for Syria: Recipes To Celebrate Our Shared Humanity

Lebanese food writer and photographer Massaad, a proponent of the slow food movement, spent the winter of 2014/15 visiting a refugee camp for displaced Syrians in Lebanon, bringing a car full of food each time. The plight of the refugees, and the world's failure to help them, led the author to create this book of recipes by an international gathering of chefs and cookbook authors (Anthony Bourdain, Yotam Ottolenghi, Paula Wolfert, and others), with all profits going to various organizations' food relief efforts. Though the recipes are by internationally known chefs, there are arrangements for hearty, down-to-earth soups (mostly hot, some chilled) that will be wonderful for home tables. Leek and potato, lentil and Swiss chard, and split pea soup are some of the entries that will be most familiar to American cooks, but the book also pays homage to the refugees' region of the world, offering, for example, instructions for Middle Eastern meatball soup with vegetables, Moroccan lentil and chickpea soup with cumin-fried whitebait, and chicken soup with freekeh. Dishes from other areas of the globe make appearances, too. Accompanying the recipes are dozens of photos, and most importantly, of the people who inspired the book: full-page and -spread images of Syrian children and adults complement the text and make this title stand out from other soup recipe sources.