The Art of Mexican Cooking: Traditional Mexican Cooking for Aficionados: A Cookbook

Quite an in depth book, well written with some beautiful drawings, please, do not be put off by some of the ingredients being awkward to locate, it IS worth the trouble. An excellent buy.

If you wish to cook Mexican food and do it well, this is probably the only cookbook you need...recipes are easy to understand and follow and the regional and cultural information is a nice touch

Great book

Ok

An excellent book to have if you enjoy cooking Mexican food.

I bought this book on my first trip to Mexico in 1995 and I havent found the need to buy any other mexican cookbook since. If I do it will be from that same author. The recipies are all authentic and delicious, well explained along with other basic information. This book is the most detailed and in dept information you can get on the subject.(Its not TexMex, so if you are looking for that kind of food then this is not the book you are looking for!)And its not a book with many photos, just very few and some drawings, but I can tell it has taken lots of time and effort to write - lots of experience and research has gone into the making of this book, because mexican cooking is not an easy task.I saw that another review has given this book just 3 stars. Thats not fair, but this is what happens when people are asked to give their opinion on a subject they dont know and have no previous experience of. I understand the frustration, but the book is not to be blamed just because the subject is complicated, and the ingridients are hard to obtain. The universal problem with cooking mexican food is to obtain the ingridients you will need, this is to be your biggest task unless you live in Mexico or close to its borders, and this should be the only reason why you could end up deciding not to buy this book. There are some recipies wich can be cooked with out special mexican chilis/ingridients, but they are not that many.How ever I do agree that its diffecult to know if the recipy you follow will turn out authentically as you have no previous experience to compare with, but this is always the case when we have to try out new recipies. In this book the recipies are so well explained that you simply cant go wrong if you follow them step by step.I have always harvested positive remarks when serving dishes from this book, they are even able to make native mexicans ask me for the recipy. I should mention that my wife is mexican and I have lived in Mexico for some years.

I think im a competent home cook, but I find this book difficult. Some of the ingredients are hard to get where i live (and therfore, i had no idea if it tasted like it should) and it doesnt have any photos of how the food should look. I think you need to be really keen and have a basic knowledge of Mexican food (which i clearly dont) to get the full use from the book and its fair to say i have only used it 6/7 times. Might just be me, but i struggled.

Me encanto pero no tiene fotos ni nada a color

The kindle version shouldn’t be sold, it was photocopied from a library and has absolutely no layout work and no index, it is impossible to use as a cookbook.

Diane Kennedy delivers (as I had heard before).It's legit the best mexican book my eyes have laid upon (and I've read quite a bunch).This is not an american-mexican food, it is about real, authentic, Mexican food that will leave you drooling just about the thought of having to taste something of it later on the day. Madame Kennedy sure knows how to talk to my heart (which is my stomach).

Soy mexicana y tuve una madre que fué una excelente cocinera y me enseñó muy bien. Tenía tiempo buscando un buen libro de cocina mexicana en inglés, pues tengo dos yernos y una nuera que sólo hablan inglés y les encanta la comida mexicana. En este libro Diana Kennedy reúne las mejores recetas de cocina mexicana, conservando su nombre original en español y dando medidas tanto en tazas, como en onzas y gramos, lo cual lo hace comprehensible y práctico para todos. Explica también el origen de la receta.

For my money, no other Mexican cookbook (printed in English) that I have seen beats Diana Kennedy's 'The Art of Mexican Cooking'. I closely peruse any and all that I find, which have been many. Kennedy is precise in her explanations, leading the reader through very flavorful and deeply authentic dishes that have always proven to be a success for me. Consequently, my guests and I are always thrilled with "Mex Night" at our place. Be advised that there are no fabulous color finished dish photos here designed to charm and seduce you into buying the author's book (see Bayless for that), but there are some useful black & white photos of some of the preparation steps. I have not found the lack of finished dish photos in this book to be problematic. Also, this is literally a cookbook, more an instruction of Mexican cooking technique and many great core recipes that make up the heart of the style. The creativity in how the elements are utilized and presented are left up to you. One should be prepared to spend some time in the kitchen for authentic Mexican cuisine. There's no escaping it. Although Kennedy also offers short cuts, good things from scratch often take time, more so when the ingredients are so humble as these. Apart from some of the salsas, these dishes will not "throw together" in 15 minutes (beginning to end), so I prep some parts one or two days before the meal. If you're into Mexican food on a regular basis, what works for me is to prepare "parts" regularly to keep in the fridge which can be thrown together in different ways to create various dishes at any time. I've cooked professionally for many years. That said, I previously (and ignorantly) dabbled in Mexican (Tex-Mex, really) food only at home, using no recipes for some time. Results were nothing to tell about. Then I bought Mad Coyote Joe's 'Gringo Guide to Mexican Cooking', a fun, short, starter book in the style and it got me hooked on the real flavors. But Joe's book offers only few recipes and I was needing more. Then there are the Rick Bayless books (if you need pictures - nothing wrong with that) which, while offering fancier, more "nouveau Mex" dishes, lacks the soul and depth that I feel with Kennedy's works, only because I feel that one must have knowledge of the origins, the root, soul & necessity of the style before one can fully comprehend and appreciate the direction & concept of newer interpretations. I completely read Bayless' 'Authentic Mexican' & found it to be OK, but I found that I needed to have Kennedy's 'Art of Mexican Cooking.' It has more. It's the real deal and it has become absolutely indispensable for me, currently in my top 10 of collection of cookbooks.