Customer Reviews

My Mexico: A Culinary Odyssey with More Than 300 Recipes

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Go to the library first and compare this with Mrs. Kennedy's other cookbooks before spending your hard-earned $. Diana has written much better books including The Art of Mexican Cooking and The Cuisines of Mexico, both of which have some photographs, mostly black and white. This cookbook has good assortment of recipes accompanied by rambling text. There are no photographs of the finished recipes to guide the novice cook with little experience in preparing Mexican cuisine. Colorful, festive presentation is an essential part of authentic Mexican Cuisine, which are best seen in color photographs. I recommend buying "Savoring Mexico" by Marilyn Tausend or "The Mexican Gourmet" by Maria Dolores Torres Yzabal. Both make beautiful gifts and also recommends where you can find the more unusual ingredients used in the recipies. (I own all 5 books mentioned here.)

If you're already aware that Mexican food is as close to divine as food gets, you'll enjoy this book, but most likely be a little frustrated by the lack of specific ingredients available stateside. Ms Kennedy rambles a bit, but it's all enjoyable. If you're a novice, I'd suggest her Cuisines of Mexico.

I have been very pleased with my edition of My Mexico. The book is filled with so many recipes. The recipes span a wide range of Mexican cooking. She writes with great detail regarding the background of the recipes as well as giving very detailed instructions. This isn't the book filled with Tex Mex recipes that we are so often used to, but, authentic Mexican cooking. Of books produced in the recent years that cover this topic, I have enjoyed this book the most.

This is the most intensely personal of Diana Kennedy's books about authentic Mexican cooking. Critics who are not knowledgeable about this subject often complain that her recipes are too complicated. That, I believe, is an excuse for laziness. Are books on authentic and regional French, Indian, Italian, Moroccan, etc. cooking similarly criticized. That is unfair and doesn't give ample credit to the culinary richness of the many parts of Mexico. No one is more accurate and true to her subject than Diana Kennedy. Little wonder that the cookbook awards (the IACP & The Jas. Beard awards) all too often miss the point but the real and lasting award is always a book's "shelf life" and being a perpetual reference. My Mexico is not only a fine, carefully researched and accurate cookbook of Mexico's culinary complexity but an excellent, informative and interesting read.

This is my first "authentic" Mexican cuisine cookbook. I'm from St. Paul, MN, where you would think there would be a serious lack of authentic Mexican food, however, the part of St. Paul I am from has a very large Latino community, the recipes in this book remind me of many meals I've had in friends homes. It is excellent if you are looking for authentic recipes and the real taste of Mexican cuisine. Fans of Taco Bell, forget it.

`My Mexico' by leading authority on Mexican food, Diana Kennedy is her eighth book, seven of which are on Mexican cuisine. This easily puts her in the forefront of writers on national cuisines, along with Julia Child, Penelope Casas, Marcella Hazan, and Diane Kochilas. It even puts her ahead of the very well known writer, educator, and Chicago restaurateur, Rick Bayless, who has paltry four books on Mexican food to his credit.

I have reviewed Ms. Kennedy's ninth book, `From My Mexican Kitchen', which I consider a real gem among treatises on the techniques of national cuisines. It goes into various techniques, especially baking, on which Ms. Kennedy is a certifiable expert, to a level of detail that one rarely sees in other books. The current book under consideration is much different from the later volume and should expect to find a much narrower audience.

`My Mexico' is a personal culinary diary, with echos of a John Steinbeck `Travels With Charley' air about it. Like many other culinary surveys, it is organized by Mexican province rather than by type of dish. And, unlike Ms. Casas' excellent `Delicioso!' culinary geography of Spain, with lots of interesting summaries of characteristics of the various regions, Ms. Kennedy is purely the tourist in this book, dwelling on the specific people and places and dishes she encounters in her travels throughout Mexico.

As an aside, I will add the opinion that Ms. Kennedy seems to find much ugliness in the urban development, congestion, lack of good highways, and disappearance of natural beauty in her beloved Mexico. The recitation of changes she finds distasteful make one wonder how her affection for the country survives the uncontrolled and somewhat corrupt development in Mexico. But then, she talks about the food and all seems forgiven.

As someone who is not nearly as familiar with Mexico as I have come to be of Italy, France, Germany, or England, the first thing I miss is a good map. This absence is especially noisome as this is about culinary geography, regardless of how personal. The second thing I miss is a listing of recipes by type of dish. As all recipes in the text are located by region or state, many of whose names are unknown to me, a listing by primary ingredient or course in the style of most cookbooks would make this book much more valuable to the novice to Mexican food. The book does include an alphabetical listing of recipes, but since it is alphabetical by Spanish name, it doesn't do me much good. I can barely find my way around culinary Italian, let alone Spanish. My study of German does little good in the largely Latin world of culinary diversity.

This is the kind of book that will be enjoyed primarily by people who already know and love Mexico. I get the picture of such readers being hobbits at Bilbo Baggins 111th birthday party with their feet up on the table and nibbling to fill in the odd, empty corners of their generous stomachs. This is the book for people who would not learn much from yet another book of familiar Mexican recipes. I would get pleasure out of a similar book on German or Austrian cuisine as I have been to many places in Germany and I believe there are not enough books concentrating on Austro-Hungarian cuisine.

Ending on a positive note, I relish the discovery in this book of a culinary treatment of cuitlacoche (on page 456), the fungus that grows on corn and which I understand it is a great delicacy in Mexico. I have been familiar with this foul looking stuff for many years, but I first encountered its culinary interest on the very first Food Network `Iron Chef America' show pitting Bobby Flay against Sr. Bayless of Frontera Grill. I was really rooting for Bayless, who lost by a single point to Flay, and I was left wondering, with Alton Brown, who was the brave soul who first looked at the stuff as something good to eat. Well, Ms. Kennedy fills us in on the subject.

Highly recommended for all who can't get enough of books about Mexican food. For all other, check out Ms. Kennedy's other books.

I've always enjoyed DK's books enormously, but this one was a disappointment. It reads like a very boring travelog, so I was glad to find it in my local library instead of paying [item price]!

I yawned through the first part.... and finally managed to read the entire text, but it was all so dull...and pointless. I hope she sticks to brief background notes and more great recipes in her new book due out soon. The recipes, as always, though, are really good!

Rarely do cookbooks give you a history of a country, of a people, of traditions alongside a wealth of recipes that are brilliantly researched and methoddically laid out so that you can actually prepare the food. A must-have if you're looking for Mexican cuisine recipes and a history of Mexican food.

I bought all the Diane Kennedy mexico books for my library. Some were redundant but had really good info. I liked this one a lot and enjoyed the story.

No one has better brought Mexican cuisine into the forefront of world gastronomy, and this book assembles a privileged collection of recipes, ingredients, techniques, as well as anecdotes on their discovery and preparation. Diana Kennedy, an adventurer in her own right, is a monument to diligence, against the background of her love and appreciation for Mexico's villages, landscape and singular intricacies, which she explores at will.