SPELT HEALTHY! by Marsha Cosentino
© 2006 Autumn Rose Press ISBN 0-9774635-5-9
442 pages, $28.95

As spelt producers, of course we were delighted to see a book published that has Spelt capitalized throughout; SPELT HEALTHY! Quality Whole Food Cooking and Baking with Spelt shines with enthusiasm for the ancestral grain.

The author, Marsha Cosentino of Payson, Arizona had spoken with us over the phone on several occasions when she was working on the book. Her aim a comprehensive perspective of spelt "from ice age to space age," Cosentino did indeed produce the most wide-ranging informative writing on Triticum spelta to date, based on numerous sources. Judging by the questions we get from our customers in the course of business, the publication of Spelt Healthy! is a very timely endeavor.

If it's a well-researched book, Spelt Healthy! grew from a personal journey. Cosentino relates how her husband suffered from wheat intolerance. "One day we sat down and examined just what we were eating," she writes. They investigated several strains of scientific literature on nutrition and health, and found that Dr Peter J. D'Adamo's Eat Right for Your Blood Type made a lot of sense; noting that her academic background is the archaeology branch of anthropology, Cosentino points out the dietary logic of eating ancient foods - "(they) generally cause the fewest modern food reactions." Replacing wheat and corn with spelt while relying on whole foods in cooking, resulted in surprising wellness, she reports: "Two months went by and we changed for the much better... Thus, in 1999, began the recipes for Spelt Healthy!"

Leave it to a good writer to guide you through the labyrinth of cereal grain history. Cosentino personalizes spelt as Spelta who "tantalizes," and then she turns into a linguistic detective to determine how the term "farro" became attached to spelt, and also to einkorn and emmer, and, too, a mixture of those three hulled gains.

By the time you've read the first chapters of Spelt Healthy!, you got to be hungry and that's when the recipes start, a long parade of 200-plus recipes, beginning with The Morning Menu and ending with Auld Lang Syne Bread. Especially useful is Cosentino's discussion of the basic cooking and baking processes particular to spelt, since spelt proteins differ considerably from those in wheat.

Perhaps not surprisingly, many of the Spelt Healthy! recipes have ethnic origins. Ebleskivers, for instance, are Danish pancakes; Bingen Spelt Porridge is Old German; Frittata with Ricotta and Herbed Spelt Crumbs are obviously Italian; the Beignes are New Orleans-related, the Brioche is French, the Pao Doce Portugese. Further on you find Tunisian Rice with Spelt Sprouts, Asian-style Hais, Greek Broiled Kasseri Cheese, Sonoran Style Enchiladas, Falafel from the Middle East, and Thai-style Tod Mun Pla: All that before you even get to the chapter on entrees.

So Cosentino loves to cook. The recipes if traditional aren't stiff but vibrant with her excitement in creating flavors. At-home gourmet has never tasted so good, the spelt blending equally well with specialty ingredients such as pinion nuts, figs, rabbit, tahini, as it goes with robust basics such as zucchini, chick pea, apple, beef.

And all this cooking fun is healthy, the recipes annotated for blood type diets, and a whole chapter of specific nutrition information for every recipe. In all, Spelt Heathy! is a tour de force to savory eating. You'll reach for your oven mitts in no time.