Women Chefs and Latin American Cooking

After my rather exciting journey to the sixth floor of the library, I found the cookbooks. There was plenty of variety, ranging from traditional American food to Latin food to high-class cuisine. After browsing through countless books there were two I found particularly interesting, Women Chefs by Burns and Brown and Latin American Cooking by Jonathan Norton.

The book Women Chefs focuses on the rise of women chefs cooking in top restaurants and getting credit for it. The author talks about how hard it was to narrow down all the book entries she received from women around the world. She explains what her criterion was; they had to be professional chefs whose cooking is different from homemade cooking; thus making this book more directed to other professional cooks and less to housewives. The author organized the book by first giving a bit of background information of the chef, then providing a picture and their most remarkable recipes. I liked the way the author spaced the text and how it was really easy to read. But mostly, I enjoyed that it depicted women becoming successful of what may be known as a male-dominated field.

The second book I selected, Latin American Cooking, caught my attention immediately since the cover was overpowered with the pictures of colorful vegetables. The book mainly focused on informing the reader about the cultural aspects of food by introducing the Latin American cuisine. The author organized the book by assigning a chapter to a different Latin American country and complimenting it with colorful and effective pictures. But instead of just providing recipes, the author gave some background information about each country’s culture, agriculture, people and location (provided a map). I really enjoyed reading through the recipes since I actually knew most of them. They even had a chapter about Peruvian cuisine; that was the cherry on top.