Chorizos in an Iron Skillet or Dangerous Tastes

Chorizos in an Iron Skillet: Memories and Recipes from an American Basque Daughter

Author: Mary Ancho Davis

"Mary Ancho Davis invites everyone to join her at the table as she recalls her family's personal traditions and history and shares special memories from her mother Dominga's kitchen. From huge cream puffs filled with heavy cream skimmed from the top of raw milk, to recollections of ringing the iron triangle hanging from a tree branch outside the kitchen door, Ancho Davis offers wonderful details about life and meals on her family's Basque ranch in Chorizos in an Iron Skillet." "When Ancho Davis's mother emigrated to the United States from Vizcaya, Spain, she brought many traditional Basque family recipes. Soon after arriving in the vast western land of Nevada, she realized that her ancestors' culinary traditions would need to be altered and adapted in her new home. No longer were standard ingredients readily available as they had been in the Old Country. Dominga also learned to adjust favorite recipes to accommodate the taste of friends, neighbors, and ranch hands not familiar with Basque flavors." "In this charming cookbook, Mary Ancho Davis traces a clear path from the Old Country traditional dishes to their modern versions as she shares her family's recipes and details the evolution of Basque cooking in America. A personal cookbook from one Basque family, Chorizos in an Iron Skillet is an engaging cultural study of culinary traditions that spans several generations of Basque immigration to the American West." With recipes for everything from Chicken Chocolate and Dominga's Chorizos to Martin Ranch Apricot Pie, these Basque ranch dishes offer a multitude of delicious ideas for down-home cooking. Illustrated with photographs from the Ancho family and including helpful advice on both ingredients and cooking techniques, Chorizos in an Iron Skillet is the perfect kitchen companion for filling your home with the flavors and aromas of Basque cooking.

Book about: La creación de una Cultura Magra: Herramientas para Sostener Conversiones Magras

Dangerous Tastes: The Story of Spices

Author: Andrew Dalby

Spices and aromatics--the powerful, pleasurable, sensual ingredients used in foods, drinks, scented oils, perfumes, cosmetics, and drugs--have long been some of the most sought-after substances in the course of human history. In various forms, spices have served as appetizers, digestives, antiseptics, therapeutics, tonics, and aphrodisiacs. Dangerous Tastes explores the captivating history of spices and aromatics: the fascination that they have aroused in us, and the roads and seaways by which trade in spices has gradually grown. Andrew Dalby, who has gathered information from sources in many languages, explores each spice, interweaving its general history with the story of its discovery and various uses.
Dalby concentrates on traditional spices that are still part of world trade: cinnamon, cloves, ginger, pepper, saffron, and chili. He also discusses aromatics that are now little used in food but still belong to the spice trade and to traditional medicine: frankincense, myrrh, aloes-wood, balsam of Mecca. In addition, Dalby considers spices that were once important but that now are almost forgotten: long pepper, cubebs, grains of Paradise.
Dangerous Tastes relates how the Aztecs, who enjoyed drinking hot chocolate flavored with chili and vanilla, sometimes added annatto (a red dye) to the drink. This not only contributed to the flavor but colored the drinker's mouth red, a reminder that drinking cacao was, in Aztec thought, parallel with drinking blood. In the section on ambergris, Dalby tells how different cultures explained the origin of this substance: Arabs and Persians variously thought of it as solidified sea spray, a resin that sprung from the depthsof the sea, or a fungus that grows on the sea bed as truffles grow on the roots of trees. Some Chinese believed it was the spittle of sleeping dragons. Dalby has assembled a wealth of absorbing information into a fertile human history that spreads outward with the expansion of human knowledge of spices worldwide.

Pasadena Star-News

Filled with folklore and historical facts, you will never again regard cocoa as just that yummy milk flavoring, or cinnamon as only that tasty red—brown spice you sprinkle on apple sauce.

Alan Davidson

Delightful and complex. When Dalby blends the spices, the result is unique and irresistible.

Forecast

Readers are treated to a tantalizing tour of nature's most flavorful, aromatic fruits in this colorful history of spices and aromatics and their diverse uses.

Wall Street Journal

Will set you straight on myrrh, frankincense, zedoary—what they are, where they came from, and what the first people who tasted them thought about them.

Ruminator Review

Dalby follows the trade routes of spices and shows how a taste for the spicy is intermingled with the thrill and risk of traveling to unknown places. But the history of spices reveals a different kind of danger as well, since it shows our greed and brutality in exploiting others so that we may please our own palates.

Associated Press

Covers a great deal of ground geographically as well as historically.

Pasadena Star News

Filled with folklore and historical facts, you will never again regard cocoa as just that yummy milk flavoring, or cinnamon as only that tasty red-brown spice you sprinkle on apple sauce.