Reddit mentions: The best caribbean & latin american cookbooks

Last year I took an "Ethnography of Food" course where we read some really great texts.

A lot of my classmates really enjoyed Around the Tuscan Table by Carole M. Counihan. It centers around various members of a family in Italy and their ideas and traditions when it comes to food, eating, and the cultural issues that surround it, like gender or class.

We also read Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, which is a pretty famous book. I found it to be the quickest read and a fascinating page-turner. It's kind of pop-culture-y though and while you could certainly consider it an ethnography, Schlosser is ultimately a journalist, not an anthropologist.

My personal favorite was Home Cooking in the Global Village by Richard Wilk, which is short, only about 200 pages of text, but really well researched and very anthropological. It's a study of the food history of the Central American country Belize, and traces back the reasons for why food in that country is so astoundingly, incredibly bad.

Also!! Let me pimp a book written by one of my most favorite professors. Labor and Legality: An Ethnography of a Mexican Immigrant Network by Ruth Gomberg-Munoz. She's a fantastic writer that I really learned a lot from, and her book is very accessible even if you're not approaching it with a lot of outside knowledge on the subject. She goes into the history behind undocumented labor migration from Mexico to the U.S., its causes and effects, and focuses on the strategies that undocumented workers employ for survival, drawing upon personal experiences and interviews with a core group of informants and their families.

Regardless of my suggestions, hope you find something to love within the world of anthropology, it's really a wonderful discipline.

Wish I could give 10 up votes to this comment! Gran Cocina Latina is my bible in the kitchen. I love Latin American cuisine from Central to South America and parts of the southwest US where there is a large Latino population. This cookbook as it all. I've given this cookbook as a gift to at least 4 friends and they love it as well.

Caribbean region here, cook for a living. It’s not new or gimmicky, but the best authority on Caribbean cuisine I’ve ever read is this one, by Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz. It covers the English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Danish, Indian, Portuguese, Lebanese, Chinese, etc., influences on the area’s melting pot of cuisines.

The best home jerk chicken recipe I’ve seen is this one.

I remember seeing this episode a while back on Hulu. Momma Cherri is on Facebook where she posts recipes and step-by-step instructions on how to make ribs that I am definitely going to try, and she also has a cookbook! Put me in a really good mood today, I am totally ordering a copy. :)

edit to fix link, derp

Sounds good except for the Goya Sazon. Get rid of that utterly useless shite. It's mostly MSG, salt and fake color. Substitute with additional garlic, cumin and coriander seed, and salt to taste. You're not doing yourself any favors, since you're doing everything from scratch anyway. If you really need that MSG, try adding a TBSP or two of yeast extract. That's a much healthier source of glutamic acid. Or better yet, bacon.

The book Cuban Home Cooking has a great black beans and rice recipe, and soup too. I've been using that one for 10 years.

Also, prepared dry black beans > canned. Soak them the day before, and rinse a few times. That's hardly any extra work for a huge payoff.

While it isn't exclusively South American, https://www.amazon.com/Gran-Cocina-Latina-Latin-America/dp/0393050696 covers South America (as well as Central America and the Caribbean and Mexico). Nice book. I haven't cooked from it yet.

For Brazilian, I've cooked from https://www.amazon.com/Brazil-Culinary-Journey-Hippocrene-Cookbook-ebook/dp/B0030P1WBI/ with tasty success.

If you folks like this recipe, check this cookbook - one of the best I have ever come across for Caribbean food...

Both of my parents are from Cuba and, prior to that, all of my ancestors came from Spain. I live by Mary Urrutia Randelman's Memories of a Cuba Kitchen and make a fair amount of Spanish food as well -- summer basically means tortilla española and tinto de verano. We've been multiple times to visit the parts of Spain that our ancestors came from (Galicia, the Basque country, and Asturias (by way of the Canary Islands)). We celebrate Noche Buena instead of Christmas day. We listen to a lot of Cuban & Spanish music. My sister and I are English-dominant now but both speak Spanish with our parents/extended family. Probably a bunch of other, smaller things.

Because others have got you covered on the jerk chicken front, I'd just nice to add Memories of a Cuban Kitchen to the list. Nice cookbook.

You might like a cookbook titled Memories of a Cuban Kitchen. There's a lot of little stories about each dish relating to the author's family growing up in Cuba... lots of nostalgia

Either Diana Kennedy - The Essential Cuisines of Mexico or Rick Bayless - Authentic Mexican. Really any book by either of those authors is going to be good.

I ended up getting Gran Cocina Latina. So far seems like exactly what I was looking for - a little bit from each region. The author seems to have quite a bit of experience with the various areas (or at least to my inexperienced eye). My only complaint is that she calls for very specific ingredients that are not readily available where I currently live, and doesn't often mention more accessible substitutes.

The one I have for Asia is The Complete Asian Cookbook, which doesn't address 'Asian' cooking as a whole, but has a chapter for each country, each with an intro about the style and ingredients of the area.

The cookbook for this is Gran Cocina Latina

http://www.amazon.com/recetas-cocina-cooking-recipes-Spanish/dp/8420649988/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1425979131&sr=8-1&keywords=1080+recetas

No problem. You can find it here: The Real Taste of Jamaica https://www.amazon.com/dp/9766370214/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_1hO7AbTTR7EHB