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Rancho Cooking: Mexican and Californian Recipes
Popular cookbook author McMahan has written the only book available on authentic California-Mexican food. A direct descendent of Spanish settlers, she takes cooks into the heart of the original California cuisine; a combination of Mexican and Spanish dishes that developed in the kitchens of California ranchos over the past two centuries. Rancho Cooking provides 125 mouthwatering recipes along with family stories and historical anecdotes about the culinary trail north.
238 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2001
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 8, 2021
The year as 1846, just before the U.S. Government took over California from Mexico, Spain having lost its dominion over California in 1821. It was three years before the Gold Rush but the lush land and natural harbors were already calling a siren song to foreigners. My family and other Californios could not have known that the pastoral life they had come to love was soon to be changed forever.
(Jacqueline Higuera McMahan, Rancho Cooking, p.x)
Will I ever make any of these recipes? Unlikely. The most attractive ones need ingredients impossible to find this far North and if you can find them, they’re not the best quality. And despite providing a selection of mail order suppliers at the back of the book I know without checking that the shipping is going to be a deal breaker. I won’t make them for the same reason I refused to make pico de gallo until my jalapeno plant was grown and my mother’s tomato plants were finally bearing fruit. These recipes are a part of the author’s family and heritage and the reader understands that they deserve respect, and they deserve to be made with the freshest ingredients possible. But while just reading the recipes and dreaming over the pictures is enough pleasure for me to find a cookbook worth owning, Rancho Cooking is a biography at heart. McMahan tell stories of her family history, as well as the history of the cooking traditions that blossomed in California’s cradle years, back when its citizens were rapidly flipping between being Spanish, Mexican, and American. I don't even have the book in the kitchen with the rest of its genre; it’s in the living room with the pleasure reading.
There are some family photos to go with the stories, but it does that often annoying thing of only having a handful of recipe pictures in the middle of the book on glossy paper, and that always annoying thing of wasting limited space with pictures of artfully arranged forks or bowls of figs or olives. The fact that I love it anyway might seem a bit more impressive, but I believe I already mentioned that I wasn’t reading it for the recipes.
In case anyone else is confused on how rancho cooking differs from Tex-Mex if they’re both blends of Mexican and American cuisine, while the Spaniards brought Mexican foods to California the climate was ideal to also transplant Spanish foods:
Many plants familiar from Spain were grown by the Californios, thanks to the botanical knowledge of the Spanish padres, who recognized the similarity between the California coast and much of Spain. But the settlers also hungered for the things they had learned to love in Mexico: the tomatoes, chiles, squash, pumpkins, and corn. The blend of Spanish and Mexican merged into Californian. In time, the Californios, particularly the rancheros, thought of their style – and themselves – as a separate one.
(Jacqueline Higuera McMahan, Rancho Cooking, p.xiv)
I’ve read a lot about Tex-Mex cuisine but I haven’t been able to find much on the years before Texas became part of America, so I don’t know if the growing conditions encouraged different Spanish foods to survive there and so created a different gastronomical landscape, or if there’s some other reason for the differences that I can’t pick up on. I do know that olives and figs were a very popular transplant from Spain and I don’t know any Tex-Mex recipes offhand that use either. Since I found this book while trawling the library for Tex-Mex cookbooks, I just want to clarify that if someone is looking for a book with nachos, fajitas, chili con queso, and corn tortillas, you're looking for Tex-Mex (the book explains that corn tortillas were rare to unheard of in traditional rancho cooking because wheat was less labor intensive to grow than corn).
CLARITY:
The recipes can feel buried under the history sometimes, which is unfortunate since it's first and foremost a cookbook in spite of the fascinating family anecdotes.
HUMAN INTEREST:
I'll obviously give it top marks here but I want to reiterate that as a cookbook it went rather heavy in this section.
MAKES ME WANT TO COOK:
I don’t actually like chiles and I can’t even stand the smell of olives. That, plus the serious lack of pictures, doesn’t make me want to cook but it does make me want to invent a time machine so I can be taught to cook by the Higuera family experts. I’m not sure if this makes sense so I’ll give it at least a three.
OTHER ASPECTS: -
The food looked amazing in the pictures, but I'm taking off a half star for the lack of photos and the wasted space with artsy table setting pictures.
THE VERDICT?
It's a good book but might not be the cookbook you're looking for.
An animal abuse warning for a family story about bear baiting.
(Jacqueline Higuera McMahan, Rancho Cooking, p.x)
Will I ever make any of these recipes? Unlikely. The most attractive ones need ingredients impossible to find this far North and if you can find them, they’re not the best quality. And despite providing a selection of mail order suppliers at the back of the book I know without checking that the shipping is going to be a deal breaker. I won’t make them for the same reason I refused to make pico de gallo until my jalapeno plant was grown and my mother’s tomato plants were finally bearing fruit. These recipes are a part of the author’s family and heritage and the reader understands that they deserve respect, and they deserve to be made with the freshest ingredients possible. But while just reading the recipes and dreaming over the pictures is enough pleasure for me to find a cookbook worth owning, Rancho Cooking is a biography at heart. McMahan tell stories of her family history, as well as the history of the cooking traditions that blossomed in California’s cradle years, back when its citizens were rapidly flipping between being Spanish, Mexican, and American. I don't even have the book in the kitchen with the rest of its genre; it’s in the living room with the pleasure reading.
There are some family photos to go with the stories, but it does that often annoying thing of only having a handful of recipe pictures in the middle of the book on glossy paper, and that always annoying thing of wasting limited space with pictures of artfully arranged forks or bowls of figs or olives. The fact that I love it anyway might seem a bit more impressive, but I believe I already mentioned that I wasn’t reading it for the recipes.
In case anyone else is confused on how rancho cooking differs from Tex-Mex if they’re both blends of Mexican and American cuisine, while the Spaniards brought Mexican foods to California the climate was ideal to also transplant Spanish foods:
Many plants familiar from Spain were grown by the Californios, thanks to the botanical knowledge of the Spanish padres, who recognized the similarity between the California coast and much of Spain. But the settlers also hungered for the things they had learned to love in Mexico: the tomatoes, chiles, squash, pumpkins, and corn. The blend of Spanish and Mexican merged into Californian. In time, the Californios, particularly the rancheros, thought of their style – and themselves – as a separate one.
(Jacqueline Higuera McMahan, Rancho Cooking, p.xiv)
I’ve read a lot about Tex-Mex cuisine but I haven’t been able to find much on the years before Texas became part of America, so I don’t know if the growing conditions encouraged different Spanish foods to survive there and so created a different gastronomical landscape, or if there’s some other reason for the differences that I can’t pick up on. I do know that olives and figs were a very popular transplant from Spain and I don’t know any Tex-Mex recipes offhand that use either. Since I found this book while trawling the library for Tex-Mex cookbooks, I just want to clarify that if someone is looking for a book with nachos, fajitas, chili con queso, and corn tortillas, you're looking for Tex-Mex (the book explains that corn tortillas were rare to unheard of in traditional rancho cooking because wheat was less labor intensive to grow than corn).
CLARITY:
The recipes can feel buried under the history sometimes, which is unfortunate since it's first and foremost a cookbook in spite of the fascinating family anecdotes.
HUMAN INTEREST:
I'll obviously give it top marks here but I want to reiterate that as a cookbook it went rather heavy in this section.
MAKES ME WANT TO COOK:
I don’t actually like chiles and I can’t even stand the smell of olives. That, plus the serious lack of pictures, doesn’t make me want to cook but it does make me want to invent a time machine so I can be taught to cook by the Higuera family experts. I’m not sure if this makes sense so I’ll give it at least a three.
OTHER ASPECTS:
-The food looked amazing in the pictures, but I'm taking off a half star for the lack of photos and the wasted space with artsy table setting pictures.
THE VERDICT?
It's a good book but might not be the cookbook you're looking for.
An animal abuse warning for a family story about bear baiting.
May 4, 2011
My favorite cook book yet! I've tried many of the dishes and have not been disapointed (I don't think my family will ever be able to go back to store bought beans or tortillas)! Only thing to be careful about would be that the servings are HUGE!
November 18, 2007
The best Mole and chicken enchiladas I've ever have, but the tamale recipe is incorrect, I believe.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews