Eat Smart in Mexico: How to Decipher the Menu, Know the Market Foods & Embark on a Tasting Adventure (Eat Smart in Mexico) [Paperback]

Joan Peterson (Author), S. V. Medaris (Illustrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 24, 2008

Veer off the tourist-beaten path to find authentic cuisine and rich new experiences in Mexico
Eat Smart in Mexico is a celebration of Mexican cuisine and one of nine titles in the authoritative Eat Smart series. It contains a rich historical perspective on the origins and varieties of Mexican food and extensive background on delectable regional dishes. Spanish phrases are included to make your culinary adventure even more successful.
At the core of the book are two extensive guides to Spanish terms with English translations. The Menu Guide demystifies food selection, allowing visitors to order with confidence in restaurants; the Foods & Flavors Guide is a comprehensive list of foods, spices, cooking utensils, and cooking styles, to make shopping in the colorful outdoor markets easy and fun. For the adventuresome traveler, this is a richly annotated resource that will help you understand and appreciate Mexican culture through authentic local cuisine.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

With the fourth title in their "Eat Smart" series, the Petersons have assembled a guide to the food of Mexico for travelers. Their book is organized into eight sections. At its heart is an extensive menu guide and a food and flavors guide. Otherwise, the authors include an informative and extensive history of the cuisine; a section on regional foods; a less successful section of a few recipes; a very brief chapter on shopping in Mexican food markets; another on mail order suppliers, cooking schools, and organizations; and a handy guide to helpful phrases. The result is similar to Marita Adair's The Hungry Traveler: Mexico (LJ 8/97) but has more history. Highly recommended for all public libraries.?George M. Jenks, Bucknell Univ., Lewisburg, PA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

“With the fourth title in their “Eat Smart” series, the Petersons have assembled a guide to the food of Mexico for travelers. Their book is organized into eight sections. At its heart is an extensive menu guide and a food and flavors guide. Otherwise, the authors include an informative and extensive history of the cuisine; a section on regional foods; a less successful section of a few recipes; a very brief chapter on shopping in Mexican food markets; another on mail order suppliers, cooking schools, and organizations; and a handy guide to helpful phrases. The result is similar to Marita Adair’s The Hungry Traveler: Mexico (LJ 8/97) but has more history. Highly recommended for all public libraries.”—George M. Jenks, Bucknell Univ., Lewisburg, PA (for Library Journal)

“Anyone sensible enough to buy a copy before taking off for Mexico will be able to eat really well and even more importantly, to understand what they are eating.”—Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz, author of The Complete Book of Mexican Cooking

“For the adventuresome traveler, this book is a “smart,” richly annotated road map that will steer you to the right markets and teach you where to find authentic Mexican food. EAT SMART IN MEXICO offers what is most important about Mexican food and culture wrapped in a nutshell. If  you cannot get to Mexico, this book will provide vicarious travel and cooking inspiration of the first order. As in Eat Smart in Brazil, the Petersons have succeeded in reaching a middle ground between the practical and the scholarly to unravel some of the best kept secrets of one of the world’s most complex cuisines.”—Maricel Presilla, Ph.D., Culinary historian and author specializing in the cuisines of Latin America and Spain --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Ginkgo Press; 2 edition (June 24, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 097768010X
• ISBN-13: 978-0977680108
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,486,793 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars EAT SMART IN MEXICO with this essential new guidebook!, February 15, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Eat Smart in Mexico: How to Decipher the Menu, Know the Market Foods & Embark on a Tasting Adventure (Eat Smart Series, No. 4) (Paperback)

While most Mexico guides devote a section to eating, authors Joan and David Peterson see food as an integral part of the journey, the very basis of travel, and their new guide "Eat Smart in Mexico" (1998, Ginkgo Press, $12.95) reflects that sensibility. One of a series that includes Brazil, Indonesia and Turkey, Eat Smart gives a historical survey of Mexican cuisine followed by an overview of each Mexican region, describing its most representative foods, from the North to the Yucatán. We learn, for example, that Michoacan residents eat churipo, a stew made with potatoes and corn and flavored with the sour cactus fruit xoconostle.

A recipe section presents essentials like birria, mole poblano and chiles rellenos, as well as more exotic offerings like cheese-stuffed squash blossoms and mezcal sea bass with black bean sauce. The recipes have been provided by a number of restaurant owners, cookbook authors and culinary experts.

The most useful section of Eat Smart is its extensive glossary, which is broken down into a menu guide and an ingredients guide. The definitions, written with the gusto of those who are passionate about what they eat, should help readers decipher menus just about anywhere in Mexico. It includes obscure items like codillo enchilmole-pig's knuckles in a black spice paste made of burned chiles, roasted onion and garlic, and juice from the bitter Seville orange, and ayocotes en coloradito-large broad beans in a rich, red, complex sauce of ancho and guajillo chiles, spices, nuts, seeds, raisins and chocolate. Browsing this glossary is certain to whet your appetite to seek out these dishes in the places where they're prepared. -Daniel C. Schecter, Business Mexico

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A well-researched and taste-filled travel guide!, September 14, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Eat Smart in Mexico: How to Decipher the Menu, Know the Market Foods & Embark on a Tasting Adventure (Eat Smart Series, No. 4) (Paperback)

This book starts you on your tasting adventures even before you go with a chapter titled "Tastes of Mexico" that presents recipes to prepare ahead of time some of the extraordinary and undiscovered cuisines of Mexico . . . and once you are there, in the many different regions each with its own specialities, what is more helpful than to have a "menu guide" with you? If food is one of your passions when you travel, and you believe one of the quickest ways to get to the heart of a culture is through its cuisines, then this book is a good flightpath to the pleasures of the palate and the richness of Mexico

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Take this book with you!, December 7, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Eat Smart in Mexico: How to Decipher the Menu, Know the Market Foods & Embark on a Tasting Adventure (Eat Smart Series, No. 4) (Paperback)

Besides containing a brief culinary history of ancient and contemporary Mexico, this very intelligent guide has two sections that are of incredible use to the traveller. "Menu guide" is an encyclopedic translation of hundreds of dishes one will encounter in the menus of Mexican cuisine annotated with phrases such as Regional Classic, National Favorite, etc. "Food and Flavors guide" goes from A la Albanil to Zempasuchil. Take this book with you and you will never be lost in the marketplace or restaurant.

Ron Cooper, President, Del Maguey, Ltd. Co., maker of Single Village Mezcal.