Recipe of Memory: Five Generations of Mexican Cuisine

Victor M Valle

ISBN 10: 1565841263 / ISBN 13: 9781565841260

Published by The New Press, 1995

About this Item

This text offers tips on how to prepare dishes, along with insights into the development of Mexican and Mexican-American cuisine. Ranging from the Spanish conquest of Mexico to the obsession with chips and salsa, the authors look at the influences on who ate what and where.

Seller Inventory # 00076783607

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Recipe of Memory: Five Generations of Mexican Cuisine
• Publisher: The New Press
• Publication Date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1565841263
• ISBN 13: 9781565841260
• Binding: Hardback
• Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

Two food journalists share the culturally rich contents of an antique chest that was left to them by their aunt, providing recipes, family journals, and photographs dating back to 1888, in a celebration of Mexican traditions.

Reviews

Classified by the publisher under the headings Cookbooks and Mexican-American Studies, this mix of recipes, photos, anecdotes and history blends its ingredients much as Mole Caragueno combines lamb, chiles, peanuts, clove and cinnamon. Delving into a treasury of 250 recipes collected and recorded by Victor Valle's family from the 1880s into this century, the authors follow the family's history from Guadalajara to Tijuana and then to Los Angeles. Just as early music sounds different when played on early instruments, old recipes taste different when prepared in the old ways; a recipe from the past allows readers "to sit down with ghosts" and taste the Chiles Stuffed with Shrimp as they were savored at Sunday lunch in 1888. Recipes such as Conejo en Huerto (Rabbit in the Garden), Sopa de Pichones (Squab on Saffron Rice) and Helado de Tuna (Prickly Pear Sorbet) capture what Mexico's poet laureate, Octavio Paz, calls the "shock of tastes; cool and piquant, salt and sweet, hot and tart, pungent and delicate." Such contrasts in this volume?e.g., quotations from academic historians juxtaposed with methods of roasting, toasting and soaking chiles?similarly startle and often enlighten.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.