Cookbook Survivor: David Sterling, Yucatan: Recipes from a Culinary Expedition
Saturday's Child Works Hard for a Living
Feels a bit beside the point to be doing this column this weekend considering what’s going on out there in the world, but the routine of writing for 8X7 has been helpful for me, so I’m going to stick to it.
This is the rare example of a cookbook that I picked up because I read some reviews of it and saw that it had won a James Beard award and thought to myself “Oh, I should have that”. So I ordered it.
When it arrived, I was a bit taken aback: it’s physically huge. It’s beautiful—it is another coffee table-ready cookbook. It tells you a ton about life in the Yucatan region and has a lot of historical depth and complexity to its account of food and cuisine there, including attention to the cuisine of Lebanese expatriates who have been in the region for a long time.
And yet as I’ve leafed through it since I have had the book (I picked it up back in 2016) I’ve never felt up to cooking from it. It frankly gave me a lot of flashbacks to how I felt about Diana Kennedy’s Mexican cookbooks—there’s a feeling of weaponized “authenticity” hovering about it, that sense of “authority”. Sterling’s depth of knowledge about the region is evident and his love for the food is too, but there’s just something that rubs me the wrong way about it all.
Part of that is that the value of the book lies in the specificity of the cuisine and most of the recipes are really strongly built around local preparation styles and ingredients. I know Mexican and Tex-Mex food and flavor profiles well enough that I’m very comfortable making substitutions or adapting recipes but there’s something about this book that makes that feel more like a chore—and a bit disrespectful in its way to boot.
But it’s past time that I forced myself to work with it some. I’ve chosen to make a preparation that involves fish cooked with tomatoes that are then put into a kind of “tortilla lasagna” with alternating layers of black beans. I’ve decided to focus partly on another attempt at making my own corn tortillas using masa harina, something I’ve really struggled with for years. (I’m really comfortable making flour tortillas with pork lard, on the other hand.)
*Guiltily looks over at the Diana Kennedy cookbooks I saved from John’s library, because…authenticity.