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People in the United States eat so much Mexican food in restaurants, you could be fooled into thinking there is no such thing as Mexican home cooking. You would be wrong. The best Mexican cookbooks lift the veil, revealing a world of lush, inviting, easy recipes that have all the elements you adore in Mexican food. But homier, and, if you’re doing it right, different than you ever knew Mexican food could be.
‘My Mexico’ by Diana Kennedy
Diana Kennedy, the prolific researcher and author, is a complicated figure in the world of Mexican cookbooks. Yes, she championed the cooking of “rural Mexican women, Indigenous women and working-class women,” said Tejal Rao in The New York Times. Yet she also “never reckoned with her authority over Mexican cuisine as a white British woman.”
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Nonetheless, “My Mexico” is a benchmark, a personal travelogue. Kennedy wanders across the country, picking up a recipe for pozolé de camarón in Jalisco, chuletas de puerco en agridulce (sweet-sour pork chops) in Morelia and chilaquiles en salsa verde from her longtime home state of Michoacán. These are purist recipes, dishes that tell the story of place as only cooks from those locales can. ($45, University of Texas Press, Amazon)
‘Oaxaca: Home Cooking from the Heart of Mexico’ by Bricia Lopez with Javier Cabral
The food people who know know that Oaxaca, a region in central Mexico, has some of the finest cuisine in the country, if not the world. It is the land of many moles, inspired uses of corn, sparkling seafood on the coast. One of the United States’ best trumpet-bearers for Oaxacan cuisine has long been Los Angeles’ family-run restaurant Guelaguetza.
In “Oaxaca,” one of the restaurant’s owners, Bricia Lopez, works to “demystify this idea that it takes days to make mole” and other signature Oaxacan dishes, Lopez said to the Los Angeles Times. Less anthropology and outsiders looking in; more hands-on cooking. “We’re just people, and this is our story. We’re not exotic.” ($45, Abrams, Amazon)
‘Pati’s Mexican Table’ by Pati Jinich
With her boundless positivity and irrepressible curiosity, Pati Jinich is a cross-border Pollyanna. She has hosted 15 seasons of her PBS show, “Pati’s Mexican Table,” and her first book, by the same name, is a cheerful invitation to embrace an open-ended version of Mexican cooking. Nothing slavishly authentic here, yet the recipes’ bones are pure Mexico.
Burgers are laced with ancho chiles and served with lime aioli. A variety of dried chiles are snipped into a plucky take on spaghetti with garlic and olive oil. Hibiscus flowers appear in a vinaigrette that dresses spinach festooned with goat cheese and caramelized pecans. Cook from “Pati’s Mexican Table,” and you too will be a beacon of optimism. ($35, HarperCollins, Amazon)
‘The Taste of Mexico’ by Patricia Quintana
A “straightforward guide” to the “fundamentals of regional Mexican cooking,” said Saveur, “The Taste of Mexico” was published in 1986. Quintana, a Mexico City chef and author, introduced American readers to the nuances of good Mexican cooking long before the country’s cuisine took over the States in all its varied glory.
The book operates like a greatest hits of Mexico’s regional food styles. Chiles en nogada from Puebla, draped in a creamy walnut sauce, capture the tricolors of the Mexican flag. Oaxacan black mole, beer-soused pinto beans from the north, European-influenced dishes from Mexico City — “The Taste of Mexico” celebrates the “sumptuous breadth” of Mexican cuisine, said Publishers Weekly. ($20, ThriftBooks, Amazon)
‘Truly Mexican’ by Roberto Santibáñez
Sometimes you want an anchor, rather than the full catamaran, when you aim to understand one of the world’s finest cuisines. In Mexican cooking, those moorings are salsa, moles and their kin. “Truly Mexican” shows you how to prepare them — and only them.
You will learn to assemble both cooked and raw tomato salsas, and be reminded that there are endless other traditional salsas that have never seen a tomato in their life. Adobos, whether with three chiles or the lone suave guajillo chile, become life-giving purees for marinated fish, chicken and beef shank. Moles are here too, in many a hue of the color wheel. With “Truly Mexican,” you will gain the “necessary skills to master other recipes,” said New World Review. Precisely what one wants from a cookbook. ($38, HarperCollins, Amazon)
‘Yucatán: Recipes from a Culinary Expedition’ by David Sterling
A grand, self-contained microcosm much like its subject, “Yucatán” hovers at nearly 600 pages, telling the varied food stories of the far southeastern edge of Mexico. The food of the Yucatán peninsula, aside from a few restaurants in a number of cities in the United States, is not known well north of the border. Sterling, who died in 2016, aimed to change that.
The “beautiful and comprehensive” book, said Portland Book Review, opens with an ingredient primer, then grabs the reader by the wrist and wanders across cities like Valladolid and Mérida, from coast to inland, and into the region’s pueblos and their singular foods. Few books mark the scope of a place so thoroughly, let alone a locale so underrepresented in the United States. ($60, University of Texas Press, Amazon)
