Food from My Heart: Cuisines of Mexico Remembered and Reimagined - Softcover

Martinez, Zarela

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0028603613 ISBN 13: 9780028603612

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Inc, 1995

Synopsis

Lavish Praise for Food from My Heart "There's as much for the serious reader in Zarela Martínez's book Food From My Heart as for the serious cook. Martínez's memoirs of growing up in Mexico...make great armchair reading..." —Los Angeles Times "Restaurateur Zarela Martínez does double duty in Food From My Heart, writing brilliantly about people and culture while demonstrating how to make quite fabulous dishes." —Cosmopolitan "Zarela Martínez is an absolute genius with flavors and this book is a great guide to her talent. I count it as one of the most interesting and invaluable additions to my library, which dates almost forty years." —Craig Claiborne Food and life are inseparable in Mexico—not just eating to live but eating to celebrate, to come together, to worship God and spirit. In Food From My Heart, Zarela Martínez describes the connection between Mexican culture and Mexican food—a collision of Old and New World ingredients, and the culinary influences of a constantly shifting ethnic mosaic. Through the telling of her own story, Martínez reveals the inextricable bond that exists between food and religion and the way Mexicans mark birth, death, marriage, and the daily business of living. Drawing upon the influences of friends, family, and traditional foods from many regions in Mexico, Martínez has created her own personal style of cooking: imaginative and highly flavorful, easy to prepare, and evocative of the classic Mexican cooking upon which it is based. It is all brought together—the traditional and the new—in the form of memoir, stories, and more than 175 recipes to create this unique cookbook.

About this title

About the Author:

Born in Sonora, Mexico, Zarela Martínez has lived in Guadalajara and El Paso. She has owned her critically acclaimed restaurant, Zarela, since 1987. She lives in New York City, where she is working on her second book.

From Publishers Weekly:

The author, proprietor of the Zarela restaurant in New York City, promises "a memoir, a guide to Mexican culinary basics, and a personal recipe collection, all interspersed with glimpse-by-glimpse evocations of Mexican life and culture." She keeps the promise. Recipes and techniques are here in abundance, yet the book is truly for those who always wished that culinary introductions, notes and sidelights on appreciation would never end. Martinez delivers both personal reminiscence and cultural insight with the taste and candor of an experienced hostess--a memoir of a family servant nestles up with a fiercely patriotic sidebar on the "Manana Syndrome." Raised among Sonora's ranching aristocracy ("By the time I was 14 I was busting broncos"), she shows how she came to immerse herself in her country's food traditions and--beginning with modest catering projects--soon found herself lionized in New York by the likes of Paul Prudhomme and Craig Claiborne. Her approach is not one of ethnic purity or "authenticity" understood narrowly; she blithely combines traditions from different regions within single recipes, "my own personal process of mestizajesic , synthesis." And, indeed, she attributes the makings of her crab enchilada to a chef for a California restaurant chain.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Inc
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0028603613
• ISBN 13: 9780028603612
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368