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World’s Best Cuisines & Traditional Food Cities - TasteAtlas Awards 2021 has lists of the dishes that make the cuisines great - and a make these dishes challenge. Which, of course, gave me an idea.

I've been adding books like these to my collection:

• 1,000 Foods to Eat Before You Die: A Food Lover's Life List | Eat Your Books


• 101 Thai Dishes You Need to Cook Before You Die: The Essential Guide to Authentic Southeast Asian Food | Eat Your Books


• 101 Asian Dishes You Need to Cook Before You Die: Discover a New World of Badass Flavors in Authentic Recipes | Eat Your Books

Has anyone tried cooking their way though one of these lists? Was it enjoyable? Did you end up with too many partially used products from unfamiliar cuisines?

Thanks so much for flagging the site, I love the idea of cooking through the list - particularly as they give a short number of dishes and products per country so you are not tied to a single dish. I'm moving country soon so it may not be the time to dig in to it too seriously but I'd love to hear how you get on. Can you see the 100-1 run down the site suggests or, like me, can you only see 50?

I agree a risk may be ending up with lots of esoteric ingredients; I'd definitely only want to approach the list in a flexible way, skipping countries where the ingredients are not accesible.

I am, separately, 'doing a list' now with the great Jubilee Read. I've loved some of the books, discovering authors I'll go back to but a couple have been a slog. Overall it has been positive so far. I wonder if this might be the same.

I get 100 Best Traditional Food in the World - TasteAtlas Awards 2021 . I'm going to work through them low-to-high

Ah I can see the 100 now mjes - interesting though a bit more restrictive than the cuisines/world cities page I had been looking at which had multiple dishes/foods per location.

From a glance I'd say I've eaten about 80% of the listed dishes though some were in restaurants rather than home cooked. And I ate lots of delicious things on trips to Turkey that are hard to ID from the list,  I may try to fill in some of the gaps - which are overwhelmingly in eastern Europe, a gap in my cookery book collection.

Thank you Mjes, cool site!, thank you for sharing it. I have one of the books you mention too, but I am really busy lately and I doubt I will be doing such a marathon at the moment.

My apologies to Rinshin, I just read your message a few days ago. I rarely receive messages at that address, so I check it just every once in a long while. Sending warm wishes and a huge "Gracias" to you as well!

I find the "before you die" language offensive, so on principle I don't use those books.

A young great niece agrees with your sentiment. When she really likes something, she says "This is to live for!" Because if it's really good, you want to have it again, and you can't do that if you're dead. So why would you want to die for it?

Anything advertised as "...before you die" is something I will ignore. If they need such sensationalization then I doubt their selections are very meaningful. I want to choose what I want based on positives for enjoying life, not for any obligation to do before death. Moronic advertising.  

Fortunately for the spirit of exploring everything, I was taught never to judge a book by its cover although I will admit that in a bookstore, the cover does have a great deal of influence on what I pick up to peruse. Yesterday I had an interesting lesson in langauge. A spice company was offering cutcherry powder - a spice I had never heard of. Except that I did know it as one of four forms of galangal which I knew as kencur or aromatic ginger but found in EYB as sand ginger, another spice term I'd never heard -- four names that refer to Kaempferia galanga. If I can deal with four names for a plant, I won't let terminology deny me the amusement of these "before you die" bucket lists.