La Cocina de Mama: The Great Home Cooking Of Spain

This attractive book contains a tempting collection of recipes for robustly flavored, down-to-earth family dishes that are generally simple to prepare. The author's discussions of Spanish cooking methods, ingredients, and wines are very helpful and informative. I have only one caveat: the text is printed on different colors of paper and may be a little difficult for some people to read; however, the recipes themselves should appeal to those who appreciate homey, heartwarming fare. Another book that offers great Mediterranean home cooking is "Recipes and Remembrances from an Eastern Mediterranean Kitchen," by Sonia Uvezian, which features a wealth of uncomplicated recipes that highlight healthful ingredients and vibrant flavors.

Mouthwatering and delicious----I haven't found a bad recipe yet and they are all well described and explained. The book is well worth the money and the food prepared from the recipes is extremely and well explained.

Truely inspiring. I have given away 2 copies to dear friends. Fun and beautiful.

`La Cocina de Mama' is Penelope Casas' fifth book on Spanish cuisine, becoming very much to Spain what Marcella Hazan and Lydia Bastianich are to Italy, in their presentations of their respective national cuisines to American readers and eaters. We do not get the high theory of Spanish cuisine as we do from Hazan with her very Italian techniques that border in sophistication on great French culinary thinking. Unlike Hazan and Bastianich, Casas is not a native of her subject country and she does not live there full time, so we get no books about the cooking of `My Spain', as we do from Bastianich' first book on the cuisine of Istria and northern Italy. However, this book, unlike all her previous volumes, comes close to being a presentation of Spanish `home cooking'. Her four previous books can be easily divided into two pair. The first pair is the smaller volumes on the two great Spanish contributions to world cuisine, `Tapas' and `Paella'. The second pair cover the entire range of Spanish cooking, with the first, `The Food and Wine of Spain' being a very systematic, classic approach. The second, `Delicioso', is less formal, but does follow a very useful structure based on the culinary regions of Spain, to which Casas gives some very inventive and illuminating names such as `The Region of Sauces' for Galicia and `The Region of the Casseroles' for Catalunya and the Baleares Islands. `La Cocina de Mama' is more anecdotal than the previous four books, picking up lots of recipes from home and restaurant cooks which have great interest in themselves, but which may not have been as representative of typical cooking in Spain. I was especially pleased to see a Foreword from the very important Spanish chef, Ferran Adria as it would have been especially curious to see a book on Spanish restaurant cooking without a not to Adria, who has been touted from here to Timbuktu as the world's greatest working chef. And yet, there are no Adria recipes in this book. One has to believe that some time soon we should see a book in English on Adria's cuisine, but we get no hints of his famous foams on these pages. Instead, true to the nature of this book, we get a recipe for a Paella done by Adria's mother. Like bouillabaisse and so many other classic dishes, I always give a little wince when I hear paella described as a `simple, peasant' dish. I confess that relatively speaking, Ferran Adria's mother's dish of rabbit, green beans, tomato, and rice is pretty easy, but it is definitely more complicated than your typical 30-minute meal. Even so, Casas takes a little liberty with the procedure for the benefit of inexperienced American cooks and finishes off the dish in an oven rather than doing everything on the burner. Casas does repeat her caution from `Paella' to bake about 10 minutes longer in an electric oven than in a gas oven. It seems to be the season for recanting old beliefs, so just as Mario Batali recently confessed that Italians do indeed eat their fair shar