Laura’s Reviews > Oaxaca al Gusto: An Infinite Gastronomy > Status Update
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Emily
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Feb 21, 2011 09:30PM
This looks interesting! I visited Oaxaca on my honeymoon and really enjoyed it there. Is this a cookbook or a book book or what?
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It is so fascinating! It is a cookbook, but it's more than that too. It is a document of the specific food culture of Oaxaca and it's filled with photos of street food, markets, plants and edible animals native to the region. Most of the recipes are usable but some are so specific to Oaxaca that their is no real way to reproduce them anywhere else. The book start off with an explanation of the pillars of oaxacacan cuisine and then examines 11 regions in Oaxaca in great detail (each region has a large chapter). Although some of the recipes look quite easy and tasty, I'm sure this will be "just a coffee table book" for many (it's huge glossy, lovely book). I'm definitely going to use it!
Also, how cool that you went to Oaxaca for your honeymoon! How was it? What did you eat? :)
Interesting! Does it mention "chapulines"? That's one of my most vivid memories of Oaxaca - a woman on the street selling "chapulines!" from her basket - I thought I'd try some until Sergio told me they were grasshoppers!
Yes! There is a short page about "chapulines". It tells how they are raised, cooked, when they are best to eat, what they are eaten with, their nutritional content and how they are so popular that they are now commercially raised in Puebla. Interestingly the book doesn't explicitly say that they are insects and any mention of grasshoppers is absent. If you hadn't mentioned what they were I might not have known. Hmm. In the pictures the dried chapulines look almost identical to the tiny dried shrimp. The most strange food in the book (at least for me) was a wasp-nest sauce "salsa de panal". It was made from the part of the nest that contained the eggs, but it was interesting because not only were the eggs used but also bits of the papery nest.
Really, there were some very enticing recipes in the book, like squash vine soup, swiss chard and pasta soup (I'm intrigued by almost all the soups in the book), green mole, a pico de gallo made with grapefruit and pasilla chiles, Arroz con leche, empanadas with custard filling and many others.