Yucatan Cookbook: Recipes & Tales

Rating:
Summary: The most slap-dash cookbook I've ever encountered.
Review: Have you ever cooked a pig's ear? Would you like to know how? You won't learn from the Yucatan Cookbook, unless you can divine more from the words "boil in salted water until done. Chop" than I can. No advice for the poor unenelightened gringo as to how long that might take, or what attributes one might look for in a properly cooked pig's ear. This sort of sloppiness is rampant in this slap-dash cookbook. A recipe for cooking beans never mentions water. More than one recipe requires you to "Prepare chilies as in the recipe for iguana," which comes later in the book and for which no page number is given. In at least one place, a page number is supposed to be given, but it is listed as 00. (The editing, clearly, is as sloppy as the writing.) I confess that I have tried no recipes from this book, but that is because I am fairly confident they would not work. As a culinary travelogue of Mexico the book is (at times) interesting. But if you want a usable cookbook of Yucatan cuisine, I suggest you look elsewhere.