AILWR = An Incredibly Long Winded Review, cause I have a lot to say.
Part travel log, part ethnography, part cookbook, Beyond the Great Wall is absolutely stunning. The whole work focuses on the other China, specifically the non-Han population. The authors have called this area "Beyond the Great Wall", but that title is misleading as some of the cultures examined are actually within the traditionally Han areas.
While the recipes are wonderful, showing you how to make traditional foods with ingredients you can find in North Amnerican stores, it is the ethnographies that are truely valuable. Easy to read, through these you learn about people like the Uighurs, the Hmong and the Yi. By giving you their religious background, geographical location, climate and religion, the authors help the reader understand where the food comes from.
Intersperced among the recipes are vignettes of authors Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid’s travels through this China. Completely genuine and enchanting, you accompany them on motorcycle rides through high mountains, sharing a meal of butter tea with tsampa in Tibet and watching nan-like bread being made by many groups. Not all are about food, thereby avoiding a sense of sameness that would make the book boring. It is a different world.
The photographs are absolutely stunning. A variety of faces, ethinic clothing, landscapes and freeze frames of every day life (all taken by the authors) make this book a perfect addition to the coffeetable.
Serious cooks will take the time to make these recipes (I may make the Mongolian Lamb Patties and the Pea Tendril Salad), but most will just look at the pictures and dream of voyages they will never take and the meals they will never eat.