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 Entertainment | Books | October 2006 
A Taste of Mexico
 Kate Shatzkin - Baltimore Sun
Schneider delivers on her subtitle with kicky prose and more than 150 authentic recipes that evoke a sense of place and introduce home cooks to the cuisine of this peninsula.
If the cooler weather of early fall already has you dreaming of warmer climes, Deborah M. Schneider's "Baja! Cooking on the Edge" (Rodale, $27.95) can bring at least a taste of them to your kitchen. With fish tacos, crab quesadillas, seafood paella and Baja-style hot-smoked fish, this book ably evokes the sea-centric cuisine of the Mexican peninsula for which it's named.
Deborah Schneider is a San Diego chef who has been making culinary forays into nearby Baja California for 20 years. The market-style photographs and essays at the beginning of each chapter give her book the feel of a travelogue.
This isn't a cookbook for beginners, but it does have some user-friendly features that will help cooks develop the skills they need to use it. There are breakout boxes on roasting vegetables for salsas; combinations for building your own quick tacos or empanadas; a guide to chile peppers; a glossary of Mexican cheeses.
The recipes we tried had smoky, earthy appeal. Roasted Fish with Wild Mushrooms, Garlic and Poblano Chiles was a good showcase for mushrooms, which show up frequently in Schneider's creations. Chicken with Honey, Cumin and Red Wine Lentils was a comforting dish that nicely balanced sweet and savory elements.
• "Dona Tomas: Discovering Authentic Mexican Cooking" by Thomas Schnetz and Dona Savitsky with Mike Wille (Ten Speed Press, $29.95) incorporates more than 90 recipes. The aim of the book is to present authentic Mexican food ("no burritos or nachos in sight") from the authors' Oakland, Calif., restaurant. You will find plenty of seafood, the herb epazote, pumpkin seeds and "canela " (Mexican cinnamon) among the ingredients.
This is indeed a restaurant book, the kind that envisions cooks making her own tortillas. Recipes skew toward the complicated. A simple dish such as quesadillas becomes something of a project with homemade fresh tortillas, a cream sauce infused with a toasted poblano chile pepper, and the additions of asparagus, goat cheese and morel mushrooms. But the flavor combinations are generally fresh and sophisticated. The book does open with helpful guides to terminology, equipment and techniques. If you have an interest in deepening your knowledge of Mexican food, access to a good Latin American market and some time to invest, Dona Tomas is a guide worth having.
• "Fiesta on the Grill" (Gibbs Smith, $19.95), the latest cookbook from Daniel Hoyer, a chef in New Mexico, offers grilled and smoked recipes with influences from a range of Latin American countries and the Caribbean. The dishes are fairly casual, built around a first chapter of dry rubs and marinades, and most of the ingredients are easy to obtain. Suggestions for seven menus at the back of the book are handy for entertaining.
Although it's not made on the grill, Hoyer's Mexican Chile-Chocolate Cake is an excellent demonstration that peppers (in this case, ancho chile powder) can be an effective stealth ingredient in chocolate desserts, adding spark rather than heat. The chile powder enlivened the chocolate flavor and just whispered its presence. |
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