Customer Reviews

Vegetarian Table: Mexico

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I acquired this book while living in San Francisco, where cheap delicious fresh Mexican food was so readily available that I never bothered making it in my own kitchen. Now, living in the Midwest, I'm delighted to have Victoria Wise as a guide.

I would emphasize the term "guide" because Wise's book encourages and at times necessitates taking matters into your own hands. The prefatory remarks that frame each recipe prove helpful and engaging. Another Amazon.com viewer faults Wise for including tomato paste and water in a recipe for "Fresh Tomato Salsa." However, the reviewer neglects to mention that both ingredients are marked optional: "a little sugar or tomato paste is included if the tomatoes need sweetening or thickening," and add water "as needed, depending on how juicy the tomatoes are." The book teaches rather than directs. Thankfully so: "Savory Chickpea and Walnut Empanada Filling" proved delicious, though only after I increased the spices (doubling! the cumin) to suit my taste.

Like many cookbooks published by Chronicle, the recipes are heavily inflected by California cuisine. Witness "An Unclassic Tostada" comprised of black beans, Golden Rice, and mango. Or a twist on the Caesar: a salad of romaine with creamy Roquefort dressing and cornmeal chili strips. "Authentic cuisine" simply does not exist anywhere, and Wise keeps this always in mind. The introduction emphasizes the many influences present in Mexican cooking, and each recipe's prefatory remarks nicely contextualize the dish-- reporting on her research and acknowledging elements gleaned from "upscale turista restaurants" and one-man stands in Coyouacan.

The dough for empanadas is mind-blowing: shockingly easy and simple but always a hit at parties. Wise's thoughtful book keeps Mexican food alive and interesting...even when tomatoes aren't at their ideal juiciest.

You might want to start with "vermicelli with tomatoes and chipotle chilies". It is a definite crowd pleaser and a very different way to prepare pasta from the traditional italian. With this recipe and several others, Victoria Wise has put together a very successful mix of flavorful and relatively easy dishes. She also provides a sufficient glossary of terms and a short history of Mexican cuisine--important for a beginner.

I like Mexican cuisine and was very happy to find a vegetarian Mexican cookbook that looked promising. Needless to say, I was disappointed.
For starters, the "fresh tomato salsa" includes tomato paste and water! Other recipes are better, but nothing particularly stands out. Pictures are rare and with all the cheese in these dishes, the food does not qaulify as healthy. Unfortunately, this is not a cookbook that I end up using often.

I would have thought that various recipes for chili or spicy bean dishes would have made their way into this book, but perhaps the American "chili" as in "chili cookoff" is more of an adaptation of Mexican styles to American cooking and ingredients than an actual verbatim import?

That aside, this appears to get to the heart of the Mexican tradition in fine style and good taste (literally).

Be forewarned though, vegetarian doesn't necessarily mean low-fat. If I recall correctly, dairy and cream are used pretty heavily in some dishes for authentic flavor, so it may not be vegan or strictly "vegetarian." One wonders whether coconut cream or other vegetarian cream substitutes might work as well in the recipes, for those wishing to adapt to their own flavor of "vegetarian"... But, as they say, to each their own. This should give a pretty authentic Mexican flavor and cooking style, and sits easily alongside the other entries in the Vegetarian Table series, whicih is quickly growing to become one of my favorites, due to its apparent emphasis on explaining cultural context and tradition as well as giving excellent recipes of varying complexity / difficulty.

I also really do like the layout of the book. It's attractive, inside and out (so long as the dust jacket remains on it; the binding is pretty plain). It includes color pages and some full-page semi-gloss prints of the foods you might be preparing. Though, like other entries in the VT series, it generally fails to LABEL the prints as to which dish is being represented. A minor quibble, as one can usually find the recipe on the adjacent page(s). They really are just eye candy, in the long run (which I enjoyed looking at).

I'd certainly recommend this book to anyone wanting that authentic flavor / cooking style. Check out the others in the series too... Thailand, Japan, Italy, America, etc.

By way of outlining my qualifications to criticize Ms. Wise, let me first say: I grew up in a household where traditional Mexican (not Tex-Mex!) food was a staple. In addition to extensive travels throughout Mexico, in college I studied in Oaxaca, where I explored local cuisine at all levels - street vendors, rural restaurants (including the one she mentions in Teotitlan del Valle) as well as high end restaurants such as El Naranjo.
I was immediately drawn to this cookbook for two reasons: first, Ms. Wise is a veteran of Chez Panisse, a restaurant I truly respect, and second, while I have much experience making Mexican food, I am a bit of a carnivore so I was excited to expand my horizons through this book's exclusive focus on the vegetarian side. The recipes are generally fine, a few raise eyebrows but nothing is really show stopping. Ms. Wise's writing, however, is unbearable.
Wise writes as though she were America's Marco Polo - returning from Mexico with tales of exotic cuisines never before discovered. True, with the omnipresence of Northern Mexican restaurants in the United States that seem to only serve taco combination platters, a first-time tourist might be forgiven for such an attitude upon returning to the US from Southern Mexico. But Wise as a gourmet chef is far from the first to make that journey, and certainly nowhere near as celebrated as those who went before. Perhaps the first was Diana Kennedy, who has more recently been overshadowed by Rick Bayless (though, at least in his first cookbook he does acknowledge his debt to her).
Perhaps such an attitude could be forgiven were her knowledge of cuisine deep and thorough. I assure you it is not. In the preface to her recipe for guacamole, she writes that the best avocados "begin life as Hass [sic] avocados." First, the variety are Haas avocados, not Hass. Perhaps she knows this and this misspelling was a typo - if that is the case, one should consequently be worried about the possibilities of typos in the recipes themselves, something that could prove disastrous to the home cook. Second, this variety was first cultivated, and remains more common, in California, not Mexico! But the bigger issue is that there are so many wonderful varieties of avocados, and she is defining the most common as the best, bar none. This argument might have held water had she said Haas avocados were the best avocados for guacamole (or, perhaps it would have been even better had she said Haas were the best for this particular guacamole recipe), but she decides to make no such qualifications. To give an idea of the respect that other varieties of avocado have received in other culinary quarters, Saveur Magazine recently had a cover article about a dozen different varieties of avocado, with notes on each one's taste and use. So either Wise has an unadventurous palate (not a good sign for a gourmand), or she was speaking from ignorance while presenting herself as an expert. Either option does not bode well.
A second glaring problem in the first few pages of the cookbook are her references to "chili peppers." I know the spelling issue I am about to raise is a contested point amongst many, so let me explain my take on this. Outside of Texas and certain parts of the Midwest such as Ohio (where "chili" refers to all things), "chili" refers to two specific things: chili (the stew-esque creation, such as "chili con carne" or "5-way chili"), or "chili powder." "Chili powder" is made from an amalgamation of dried and powdered "chiles." "Chiles" are the peppers you can grow/buy/obtain such as poblanos, jalapenos (chipotles are just smoked jalapenos), habaneros, etc. Thus, when you go to the spice aisle of a grocery store, you will see "chili powder" next to "ancho chile powder" or "chipotle chile powder," etc. Chili powder is essentially scraps thrown together, while chile powders are made from specific chiles.
Thus, it is frustrating when she refers to poblanos, jalapenos, etc., as "chili peppers." Were she writing a Tex-Mex cookbook, that would probably be fine. However, this purports to be a Mexican cookbook, and she writes as though she were aiming at Texas and Ohio.
All in all, a true disappointment. The concept was very good - there are a lot of non-meat dishes from Central and Southern Mexico that are overlooked in the US, and someone should bring these to light. Unfortunately, Ms. Wise is not that person.

Chapters include salsa and condiments (piquant sauce, smoky tomato ketchup, papaya and peanut salsa); tortilla cuisine (chiles con queso, chick pea and walnut empanadas); soups (melon and potato, avocado vichyssoise); pasta, rice and beans (vermicelli with tomatoes and chipotle chiles, Mexican pilaf, bean cakes); salads and vegetables (fava bean stew, cactus paddle salad); sweets (flan, rice pudding).

Gorgeous color photos are large close-ups of beatifully presented dishes and, while this is no low-fat cookbook, Wise uses no lard and has reduced fat in many recipes. She includes a glossary with preparation tips.