More to the point, perhaps: With her book, a follow-up to the hit “Mexico: A Cookbook” and published last year, the chef and restaurateur writes, “I saw the opportunity to show the deep vegetarian roots that traditional Mexican cuisine has. The further back we go in the history of the region, the more vegetarian the roots of its cuisine become.”
The book is a treasure trove of 400 home-cook-friendly recipes. While classics such as chiles rellenos and tortilla soup appear, Carrillo Arronte also includes such surprises — at least to me — as a fresh fig cake (the fruit arranged like jewels over whipped cream and crispy meringues) and mushrooms roasted in corn husks. The variety and breadth are astounding, even though I do bemoan the absence of headnotes that could illuminate the traditions behind the dishes.I don’t necessarily associate cauliflower with traditional Mexican cuisine, but that’s apparently my mistake: According to an article in El Restaurante magazine, after Europeans brought cauliflower to the New World, “Spanish friars cultivated it in the monastery gardens of New Spain.” A Mexico City friar’s handwritten cookbook that includes four recipes for cauliflower is dated 1780, according to cookbook author Karen Hursh Graber. Mexico has a much longer history than that, but two and a half centuries of cauliflower is good enough for me.
