Product Description

In Latin America, centuries of collusion between peoples-indigenous tribal cultures, European conquerors, slaves from Africa and the Caribbean-and complex patterns of immigration have produced a fabulous fusion of flavors. Renowned food writer Elisabeth Luard meanders across half a continent and its distinct island cultures, surveying all the essential ingredients and 200 regional recipes in this delicious introduction to Latin American cuisine.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #420117 in Books
• Published on: 2006-12-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

From Booklist
All cooking depends on ingredients, their quality, and the cook's skill in handling them. Knowledge of ingredients and what makes a cuisine unique are fundamental to a cook's success. Luard demystifies Latin American cooking for everyone by addressing each fruit, vegetable, meat, fish, spice, and grain individually. Recipes accompanying each ingredient show its most typical uses. Luard covers the full range of Latin American cooking, not limiting her research to Mexican or Brazilian cuisines. For those whose curiosity extends beyond the item's comestible functions, Luard provides medicinal uses as appropriate. Full-color illustrations help cooks identify these foods in the market. Luard's expertise comes in particularly handy to help cooks distinguish different beans, or to make sense of the dozens of varieties of potato that now routinely appear outside their native Peru. Bakers may find Luard's recipe for fragrantly spiced almond-lard cookies especially attractive. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
A continent famed for its colour, feistiness and general happy-go-lucky population also has one of the tastiest, but oft ignored, multinational cuisines in the world. An eclectic mix of Spanish, Portuguese, American and Caribbean, the dishes reflect each country's best traits. Chillis, tamarillos, mangoes, bananas, cassava, prickly pears: mixed with fish, meat or on their own, they are transformed into colourful, feisty dishes guaranteed to warm the heart. Celebrated cookery writer, Elisabeth Luard, was brought up in South America and Spain and came to know the minds and methods of Spanish cooks. She offers an informative insight into the ingredients accompanied by anecdotes and advice on where and how to buy these exotic items. Beautifully illustrated, the colour photographs of Francine Lawrence emphasise the colour and joy of this vast Latin American continent and offer a visual feast of the recipes to be discovered within. - Lucy Watson

About the Author
Elisabeth Luard spent much of her childhood in South America and cut her culinary teeth in Montevideo. On the river Uxumazintla she learned how to pluck and roast a parrot; in the plains of Guerrero she found out how to ferment the juice of the maguey cactus. Elisabeth's previous books include Saffron and Sunshine, The Rich Tradition of European Peasant Cookery (made into a 13-part series for BBC2), Flavours of Andalucia (Glenfiddich winner, 1992) and Sacred Food (Gourmand International Award for Best Culinary History Book, 2001). The Food of Spain and Portugal, published by Kyle Cathie, won a 2004 Gourmand World Cookbook Award for Best Foreign book.

Customer Reviews

Fantastic Learning Resource
I am an avid cook, but after moving to Costa Rica, I was presented with new ingredients that I didn't know what to do with. Though willing to try my gringo favorites, my Costa Rican boyfriend was used to a different diet and "comfort foods" that I had never even heard of. I wanted to adjust to my new life and environment, and learning to cook traditional Costa Rican & Latin American foods was a key part of the process.

My suegra (boyfriend's mother) gifted me this book for Christmas, after I had fawned and drooled over it at one of my favorite bookstores. It has been an incredible resource for me, detailing each ingredient with incredible detail, explaining how it is used throughout South America.

One of my favorite details is that Laurd tells readers the names of each ingredient in different countries, which if you're familiar with Latin American Spanish, can vary greatly. After each one of her detailed descriptions, Laurd provides two or three typical recipes that include the ingredient, giving new L.A. cooks a good beginning typical foods arsenal.

If you're new to Latin American cooking, I can't recommend this book highly enough. However, keep in mind that it's more of a learning tool than a recipe book.

It's OK
I was not really impressed with the recipes in the book. I have eaten allot of Latin food over the years and this book didn't do anything for me. But that my opinion too.