If you have three grand sterling in your pocket, you can go online right now and buy a 7-day culinary tour of Bolivia, exploring the best places to eat in La Paz and elsewhere and visiting the wineries of Bolivia.
Yes. Bolivian wineries.
In the 2013 Best Restaurants list, there are several chefs from Brazil, Peru and Mexico in the top 50.
And Maricel E. Presilla’s monumental doorstop book, “Gran Cocina Latina”, has just won the James Beard Award.
Poor old you. Just ready to get to grips with the New Nordic Cuisine, just bought your guidebook to Copenhagen and Stockholm, and the buggers shift the culinary zeitgeist to another bleedin’ continent.
That’s the way the Zeitgeist goes. It used to be France (remember that?). Then Spain grabbed the ball. Then the Nordics stove ahead by grabbing the baton.
And now we have a whole new continent to consider: Latin America.
Well, there is no better introduction to the cooking of this vast region than this vast book. Almost 900 pages long, it has thirty five pages alone on empanadas, and almost forty pages on tamales. And Ms Presilla is devoted and learned: writing about the fundamental adobo, she says: “For us, what distinguishes a civilised from an uncivilized kitchen is not the Levi-Straussian distinction between the raw and the cooked but the difference between the unseasoned and the seasoned. In this sense, the adobo is of profound importance”.
So, go grab your garlic, allspice, cumin and bitter oranges and get to work on this eye-opening text. Next thing you know, you’ll be on a ‘plane to Bolivia, ready to sample that food and those wines.
Gran Cocina Latina, The Food of Latin America, by Maricel E. Presilla (W.W. Norton)
John McKenna
