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Rating: 
Summary: Fire and Sugar (blech...)
Review: The combination of hot and sweet combines 2 of the 5 basic flavors. The few recipes I tried produced flavors that did not work for me, so personally this book was a bust. On the other hand, this book is a treasure laden resource for chile-heads, or fans of Chile Pepper magazine. The authors of this book are also editors of Chile Pepper magazine. So, if you are a subsriber to this periodical, you will certainly want this book.
The quality of the recipes, however, left something to be desired. First, the recipes themselves were sort of generic. They seemed to be ordinary recipes that someone had added some chile peppers onto, and then proclaimed as something special. They certainly were not; the recipes themselves, minus the heat, are ordinary ones you can find in almost any magazine that has recipes or in a inexpensive paperback cookbook. On the other hand, they are typical of the ones you will find in the aformentioned periodical.
Second, and more problematically, the recipe procedures were too informal to be truly useful or reliable. Most recipes, even the complicated involved ones, were casually tossed off in a few sentences. None of them had the detail or information necessary for proper execution.
Only chapters on fruits and drinks had any culinary merit. The flavors of combining fresh, sweet fruits is trendy these days in Latin-American communities, but without much historical merit. It is a food I have had a few times at festivals, and have never liked. Also, adding chile heat to various drinks is important and certainly worthy of attention.
One important problem with this book is the variety of unusual chiles required by ingredient lists. Some of them are extremely rare outside of Mexico, and I was unable to obtain many of them, even though I live near several large latino communities with well stock grocery stores with native latino ingredients. There is no guide to chiles in general, although this information is easily had from Dave DeWitt, Mark Miller, Ten Speed Press, et al. Also lacking is a substitution guide for the chiles, when you cannot find the ones listed in the recipes but still want to try the recipe. I had to do so some subtitution, but based on my own rather incomplete understanding of the subject of chile varieties.
It has the following chapters: candies, cookies, puddings, bread, jam, cakes, pies, fruit, drinks, and ice cream.
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