Books Every Mother Can Love

Mothers should be pampered for Mother's Day. That means that when you give your mother a cookbook, you should also treat her to a dish made from that cookbook. We've made how-to videos for two recipes from Terry Thompson-Anderson's newest cookbook, Breakfast in Texas: Recipes for Elegant Brunches, Down-Home Classics, and Local Favorites. We've got one recipe for a Bloody Shiner using Texas Hill Country Distillers moonshine, and a classic recipe for Huevos con Migas that can be made ahead of time and served to mom on Sunday morning.

We have more recommendations for books that make great Mother's Day gifts, including books for birders, art lovers, swimming hole aficionados, and more.

* Top Pick *

Breakfast in Texas
Recipes for Elegant Brunches, Down-Home Classics, and Local Favorites

By Terry Thompson-Anderson, with photos by Sandy Wilson

The author of the James Beard Cookbook Award finalist Texas on the Table presents nearly one hundred recipes for breakfast and brunch, including favorites from some of Texas’s most popular restaurants, along with menus for entertaining and delightful culinary notes.

Hardcover, $35.00

311 pages | 8 x 10 | 123 color photos | ISBN: 978-1-4773-1044-1

How to Make Terry Thompson-Anderson's Huevos con Migas

Watch the video

More Mother's Day Books

Texas on the Table By Terry Thompson-Anderson, Photos by Sandy Wilson One of Texas’s leading cookbook authors presents 150 recipes that showcase the state’s bounty of locally grown meats and produce, artisanal cheeses, and award-winning wines, along with fascinating stories of the people who are enriching the flavors of Texas. Hardcover, $45.00 ISBN: 978-0-292-74409-7 This Land An American Portrait Photographs by Jack Spencer Foreword by Jon Meacham Created across thirteen years, forty-eight states, and eighty thousand miles, this startlingly fresh photographic portrait of the American landscape shares artistic affinities with the works of such American masters as Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, Mark Rothko, and Albert Bierstadt. Hardcover, $45.00 ISBN: 978-1-4773-1189-9 Nina Katchadourian Curiouser Edited by Veronica Roberts Essays by Jeffrey Kastner and Veronica Roberts; interview by Stuart Horodner This catalogue of an exhibition at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin presents a mid-career survey of the work of Brooklyn-based artist Nina Katchadourian. Hardcover, $34.95 ISBN: 978-1-4773-1151-6 The Collections: The University of Texas at Austin Edited by Andrée Bober Spotlighting more than eighty collections in very diverse fields, this extensively illustrated volume showcases the unparalleled quality and range of the holdings of the University of Texas at Austin. “Like all wonderfully rich cabinets of curiosities, The Collections rewards slow and repeated looking.” —Glasstire Hardcover, $125.00 ISBN: 978-1-4773-0785-4

A Love Letter to Texas Women By Sarah Bird Acclaimed author Sarah Bird celebrates the uniqueness of Texas women in this beautifully designed gift book. “Sarah Bird is a true eccentric, but one with a straightforward gift for explaining the human heart. . . . A Lone Star girl-legend.” —Boston Globe Hardcover,  $16.95 ISBN: 978-1-4773-0949-0 The Swimming Holes of Texas By Julie Wernersbach and Carolyn Tracy; photography by Carolyn Tracy Full of practical information to help plan your visits and enticing color photos of one hundred freshwater swimming holes, here is the first-ever guide to the best places to swim in Texas. Paperback, $21.95 ISBN: 978-1-4773-1237-7 The Quality of Life Report: A Novel By Meghan Daum, Foreword by Curtis Sittenfeld A New York Times notable book, The Quality of Life Report is the critically acclaimed first novel by Meghan Daum, New York Times best-selling author and winner of the PEN Center USA Award for creative nonfiction. Paperback, $15.95 ISBN: 978-1-4773-1300-8 Comfort and Glory: Two Centuries of American Quilts from the Briscoe Center By Katherine Jean Adams, Foreword by Karoline Patterson Bresenhan and Nancy O’Bryant Puentes Showcasing 115 remarkable quilts that span more than two hundred years of American quiltmaking, this volume introduces an outstanding collection of American quilts and quilt history documentation. Hardcover, $ 75.00 ISBN: 978-1-4773-0918-6

One More Warbler A Life with Birds By Victor Emanuel, with S. Kirk Walsh With stories of sighting rare birds ranging from an Eskimo Curlew to the cranes of Asia, one of America’s foremost birders recalls a lifetime of birding adventures, including friendships with luminaries Roger Tory Peterson, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton. Hardcover, $29.95 ISBN: 978-1-4773-1238-4 The Texanist Fine Advice on Living in Texas By David Courtney and Jack Unruh The first collection of acclaimed illustrator Jack Unruh’s work, this book gathers the best of the illustrations he created for The Texanist, Texas Monthly’s back-page column, along with the serious and not-so-serious questions that inspired them. Hardcover, $24.95 ISBN: 978-1-4773-1297-1 Chrissie Hynde: A Musical Biography By Adam Sobsey With new insights into her life and music and fascinating details about the making of all of her albums, this is the first book about Rock and Roll Hall of Fame legend Chrissie Hynde, the leader of The Pretenders. Hardcover, $24.95 ISBN: 978-1-4773-1039-7 Yucatán Recipes from a Culinary Expedition By David Sterling Winner of the 2015 James Beard Foundation Cookbook of the Year Award With over 275 authentic, easy-to-follow recipes, lively stories of their origins, and luscious illustrations, here is the definitive work on the foods of Yucatán, one of the world’s great regional cuisines. Hardcover, $60.00 ISBN: 978-0-292-73581-1

Diana Kennedy's 19 Culinary Pet Peeves

Diana Kennedy doesn't suffer fools. As the world’s preeminent authority on authentic Mexican cooking and one of its best-known food writers, she is renowned for her uncompromising insistence on using the correct local ingredients and preparation  techniques. No shortcuts! She has taught generations of cooks how to prepare traditional dishes from the villages of Mexico and, in doing so, has helped preserve the country’s diverse and rich foodways. But she has also proudly stoked a reputation for no-nonsense straight talk. Unafraid to voice her opinions (thank goodness), Diana Kennedy has outlined her many culinary pet peeves—her bêtes noires—in her new book, now back in print after many years, Nothing Fancy: Recipes and Recollections of Soul-Satisfying Food , New Edition.

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Beyond her bêtes noires, Nothing Fancy is the portal into Diana Kennedy's life at home. The recipes in the book are her personal favorites, from comfort foods to show-stoppers for important guests. Kennedy draws from her childhood in England and her life in Mexico, as well as peppering in a few international dishes from her travels.

We've excerpted Diana's brilliant bêtes noires below. In addition to chapters about her life and recipes for her favorite foods, she also covers her culinary addictions and the equipment she simply cannot do without. Enjoy Diana's unfiltered opinions on the proper way to enjoy and promote sustainable food. Nothing Fancy: Recipes and Recollections of Soul-Satisfying Food , New Edition is out now.

My Bêtes Noires

By Diana Kennedy

Now that I’ve been tagged as the “scourge of gastronomy,” I feel all but obligated to scourge away at some of the things that drive me mad in the food world—some of them just annoying and others that are essential to expose as the enemies of flavor.

Kosher salt

I know, I know, this is the beloved salt of virtually all American chefs, and it seems to be the default choice in cookbooks and food magazines. I find the flavor pedestrian, and ever since it failed me in a corned tongue recipe, it’s been banned from my kitchen in favor of sea salt, the salt of the ancients. For years and years, I seemed to be the only cook in America who wasn’t on board with kosher, but then I learned that the late Marcella Hazan also loathed it, thought it added only sourness to food, and believed it basically ruined anything it touched. She used only sea salt. The various and little-known Mexican regional sea salts are the ones I use for everything. If you’re not used to using sea salt, it tastes saltier, so you can almost always halve the amount of salt in the recipe—but taste afterward to be sure it’s right.

Of course I was delighted to find my prejudice against kosher salt endorsed by Mark Bitterman in his authoritative book Salted (Ten Speed Press, 2010). To quote Mark: “Kosher salt is a processed food, with all mineral and moisture qualities intrinsic to real salt stripped away, and with a crystal structure fabricated by automated processes. The flavor is antiseptic, like the bright fluorescence of a laboratory on a spaceship drifting aimlessly away from earth.” And this: “When we cook with kosher salt we sanctify the artificial, we embrace emptiness . . .” Bitterman lists kosher salt as first under Industrial Salts, with a taste of “metal; hot extract of bleach-white paper towel; aerosol fumes” and “best with: marsupial roadkill” (p. 185).

And speaking of salt, for some reason the latest generation of bakers seems to have forgotten, or never learned, that you must always include a little salt anytime you’re baking with flour to bring out the maximum flavor of the wheat. I’ve had way too many tarts and pizza crusts that taste flat because the baker skipped the salt. Speak up!

Brining

Oh please, don’t invite me! That salty sameness throughout is SO boring. Surely it was meant only to preserve meats or fish in a hot climate.

Cinnamon (Cinnamomum verum) versus cassia (Cinnamomum cassia)

I am amazed at the inability of chefs to recognize the difference between true Ceylon (Sri Lanka) cinnamon (canela in Spanish) and cassia, the much cheaper pretender that is not only confused with the real thing but often labeled AS the real thing in the market, even gourmet markets. I can walk through a kitchen door and tell immediately if a baker is using cassia or cinnamon; the difference is that dramatic.

Cassia is used in South Indian dishes, and it’s much darker in color, with a harder bark. Sometimes called false cinnamon, it’s usually harvested in China or Vietnam. True cinnamon comes from Sri Lanka in quills, layers of bark, with a much lighter color and a more complex, haunting fragrance. It’s best to grind your own cinnamon, as with most spices, and to acquire it from a reliable source, such as spicetrekkers.com, who stock two grades of true cinnamon. Once you have that flavor in your repertoire, cassia simply won’t do.

Canola oil

Aside from the purported health benefits of the canola—of course, there is no such seed; it’s just an invented name for highly processed rapeseed— I dislike both the heaviness of the oil and its flavor. Banned from Quinta Diana.

The World as Seen Through Turkeys

By Nicolas Trépanier

If Thanksgiving taught me anything, it is that the United States is a foreign country. They do things differently here.

When I moved across the border from my native Québec in order to pursue my doctoral studies, I brought with me a firm conviction that I would find myself in known territory. I had already spent a quarter century consuming American cultural products, after all, and I was relocating only a few hundred miles from my hometown. Later that Fall, as Thanksgiving was approaching, I did not expect much more than the Thanksgivings I was used to: a day off school, a meaningless but welcome hole in the collective schedule just when I had a 

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term paper in desperate need of being written.

But what I actually ended up encountering was one of the highlights of the annual calendar, a celebration with well-established rituals and social obligations that emptied the graduate dorm where I lived and that caused much pity to be cast upon us, poor international students who (as we suddenly discovered) were expected to feel deeply depressed to be away from our families on such a special occasion. Thanksgiving, I realized, was completely new to me.

And why should it not? Thanksgiving might be the most American of holidays, both because of its gravitational pull in our calendars and because it does not have a real counterpart outside Anglophone North America. This strongly regional character, in turn, means that a deep look at Thanksgiving can yield a lot of insights about the culture that created it. It’s a way to look over America’s shoulder as it waits in line to cash out at the supermarket, and to draw all sorts of conclusions on the way it lives its private life.

Looking into a culture’s shopping cart and drawing all sorts of conclusions about it is also what I do in my book Foodways and Daily Life in Medieval Anatolia—except that it involves another kind of Turkey. Looking at a region that was about to become part of the Ottoman empire, the book examines the various ways people interacted with food (growing it, buying it, eating it or avoiding it for religious reasons) in order to reconstruct the texture of daily life in a culture far removed from our own, far from the bird turke and from cranberry sauce.
Food can be a pretext to document almost anything. Let’s take the way that food enters a house and reserves are managed, for example. Fourteenth-century sources include a number of anecdotes where men, after several days of deep immersion in religious rituals, are suddenly snapped out of their devotions by worries about supplying their homes with bread and meat. In another set of anecdotes, we encounter devout young women who, having taken bread and oil from the house to feed a wandering dervish, have to bear the wrath of their sinful mother-in-law, herself blinded to sainthood by her jealous management of the food pantry. These, and a host of other anecdotes, superficially center on food provisioning. But they also paint a vivid picture of the distribution of power and responsibilities among genders and generations, the collaborative and conflictual character of their interactions, and the contrast between the ways social roles played out outside and inside the house.

Why We Celebrate Cinco de Mayo, Pt. 1

Cinco de Mayo is coming up and Americans are already salivating over all of the tortilla chips, salsa, margaritas, and gooey cheese and refried beans to be consumed on May 5. We're lucky enough to know a few experts on Mexican cuisine; Diana Kennedy, Lucinda Hutson, and now Chef David Sterling have all published authoritative books on the best Mexico has to offer the global palette. Chef Sterling, author of Yucatán: Recipes from a Culinary Expedition, really knows his Mexican cuisine and his history, so we asked him to give us a primer on Cinco de Mayo.

'Conflict and Cuisine: Picking Your Battles Over Dinner'
By David Sterling

Eating special foods to celebrate Victory is nothing new. Dormice dipped in honey and rolled in poppy seeds were a perennial favorite at the feasts following the processions of the famed Roman Triumphs. Closer to our own era, the rather more plebian hot dogs, hamburgers and cherry pie appear annually on the Fourth of July; ratatouille and crêpes Suzette honor Bastille Day festivities; and buñuelos, churros, “puffy tacos”, and other Spanish-American foods are devoured during the remembrance of the heroes at the Alamo in the annual Fiesta San Antonio. And where would Cinco de Mayo be without Tex-Mex enchiladas drowning in chili and molten cheese, washed down with a river of beer and Margaritas? 

What we consume serves as a vivid metaphor of our political and cultural selves; the very zoetic act of ingesting and digesting delicious food is a flamboyant - and pleasurable - way of thumbing one's nose at the vanquished. And for those of us not on the battlefield, our full stomachs and alcoholic buzz are vicarious ways of participating in the victory.

One thing quickly becomes clear from the above menus: you don't have to be French - or Mexican or American - to celebrate and enjoy these victory feasts and their foods. Francophiles around the world rush to purchase the best macarons for their guests on Bastille Day, and college fraternity brothers crowd bars from Seattle to Syracuse to down numberless Coronas and gloopy nachos on Cinco de Mayo.

But once we have gobbled the last crumb of our victory meal, do we really know what we have just been celebrating while we chewed? Probably most people know at least the basics: that citizens stormed a jail known as the Bastille, subsequently igniting the French Revolution; or that Texas defenders booted out Santa Anna's army at the Alamo, which eventually led to Mexico's surrender of Texas to the U.S. - or something like that. Beyond the highlights, the details become murkier.

I believe that this is particularly true of Cinco de Mayo. Take a poll to enquire what the date represents, and it is likely that most respondents will acknowledge that it is “Mexican Pride Day.” Still others will say that the 5th of May corresponds to our 4th of July - Independence Day. And a handful of others will simply glaze over and head for the party.

An interior spread from Yucatán

Of course, Cinco de Mayo has nothing to do with Mexican Independence. The Battle of Puebla, popularly known as “Cinco de Mayo”, was a battle during Napoleon III's so-called French intervention in Mexico, when on 5 May 1862 a small number of Mexican soldiers defending Puebla defeated a much larger French army. As in all histories, victories can be tenuous: in spite of Mexico's victory in this particular battle, the French indeed went on to conquer Mexico - but in yet another reversal of fortune, they were forced out of the country just four years later. Nonetheless, since 1862 Mexicans have honored the Fifth of May as a day of victory, and therefore of Mexican pride.

Journey through Diana Kennedy's Mexico

Diana Kennedy's My Mexico contains over 300 recipes. First published in 1998, the book is, by Diana's own admission, 'highly personal.' She has a story for almost every recipe she has collected over the years; some are fascinating, some are funny, some are chilling, and all of them are delivered in her inimitable voice.

Kennedy's stories drive the book's organization, which is divided by regions (e.g., the Gulf Coast) rather than any particular kind of recipe. With Google's new Maps features, we've plugged in some of the towns in which Diana dined with both friends and strangers to draw inspiration for the recipes in My Mexico. You can click on the location pins in the maps and glimpse the variety of recipes found in the book. After the excerpt below, you'll find a recipe for a delicious snack from Michoacán.

Warning: Navigating these Google maps may lead to increased appetite for the likes of torrejas de frijol (bean fritters in chile sauce), hongos guisados con yerbabuena (mushrooms cooked with mint), or mole de iguana negra (yes, it's what you think it is).

Access the Google map below here: mapsengine.google.com >>

Access the Google map below here: mapsengine.google.com >>

From the book:

San Pancho—How I Got There

It is the beginning of May, and the hottest month of all, as I sit down to write this book in my ecological house in San Francisco Coatepec de Morelos, known locally as San Pancho. The sky is hazy with heat and the dust stirred up by the sudden gusts of high winds, with occasional palls of smoke from a forest fi re in the mountains to the east. Oft en these fires are purposely started by clandestine agents scouting timber for the greedy timber merchants who can then go in to clear and to cut or by farmers’ unattended burning of last year’s stubble to prepare the land for planting. The hills to the south and west are brown and bare in sharp contrast to the brilliant green valley, where the dam provides irrigation to the low fields around it. This is the month when tempers flare and explode, when young blades and old machos drink up a storm and give primeval screams or shoot off their rounds of ammunition as they saunter through the lanes of San Pancho. There is a heaviness in the air and a sense of foreboding. Will the rains come on time? The signs are anxiously awaited. Heriberto, my nearest neighbor, says he has seen the first aludas, winged ants, that are a sure sign, but the mayates, June bugs, hovering around the lamps and bombarding me at night are still too small. André down at the hotel says the swifts have not yet finished their nests (of course it is hard to know, since he drives them away with a broom because their droppings off end his sense of order—inherited from his French colonialist father). Occasionally the sky will threaten rain toward evening, and the next morning there is a delicious scent of damp undergrowth from the tree-clad mountains above. But when the bullfrogs begin their first intermittent raspings, you know that rain is near. On the other hand, if the rainy season starts too early, the last of the coffee berries will burst and spoil, the tomatoes will rot and never ripen, and too often August, the month in which the ears of corn are filling out, will be dry. At this time of year I bless my adobe house, despite all its drawbacks. It keeps pleasantly cool while the water from the primitive solar collector gives me piping-hot showers. People who live in harsher climates tend to think that there are no seasons here in the semitropics of 5,900 feet. Yes, there’s no snow, and just a very occasional frost or brief, gusty hailstorm. January is a bare month, cool and sunny, and if we are in favor with the gods, the first days of February bring welcome rains, cabañuelas, which encourage the plums and peaches to bloom and help top up the tanks for the hot, dry months ahead. The weeks that follow bring the most brilliant-hued flowers of the year: bougainvilleas of all shades, geraniums, amaryllis, cacti, and tropical climbers contrasting with the pale blue masses of plumbago, while citrus blossoms perfume the air and my bees are satiated with these aromas. The vegetable garden is at its best. The first delicate peas and fava beans are harvested, and the nopal cactus rows come alive, shooting out their tender and succulent paddles. Carlos, who is in charge outside, cuts the vegetables and collects the blackberries and strawberries a little too early, but, as he explains, we have a host of eager and cunning winged sharecroppers who would leave me nothing if they had their way.

Wall Street Journal :: Colonel Sanders and the American Dream

The American Way of Eating
Harlan Sanders and Clarence Birdseye, just like today's locavores, saw a meal as a way to improve people's lives
By Henry Allen

Colonel Sanders and the American Dream

by Josh Ozersky

Buy It Now

 Fine, fast and frozen: three food groups that changed America after World War II.

Let's take them in order, by contemplating the revolutionaries chronicled in three biographies:

First, there is Craig Claiborne, the New York Times columnist who taught us how to know good from bad veal fricandeau and how to bedizen our kitchens with copper pots from France. Second, Colonel Harlan Sanders, a founding father of fast food—his was Kentucky Fried Chicken and he sold it by the bucket.

Third, Clarence Birdseye, the frozen-food man who believed in a future built by industry, an inventor who gave us seafood far from the sea and fruits and vegetables far out of season. Birdseye and Sanders aimed at the masses. Claiborne, however, addressed the emerging classes known variously as creative, culture-bearing and knowledge, along with the rich, who could afford to eat Henri Soulé's food at Claiborne's beloved Pavillon in Manhattan before it closed.

During a life chronicled by Thomas McNamee in an insouciant biography called "The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat," Claiborne joined with heros of the table such as M.F.K. Fisher, James Beard, Julia Child and Alice Waters to create a new kind of gourmet or gourmand—what we now call the foodie.

There had once been gourmet splendor in hotels and railroad dining cars for the rich in America, but it faded with the Depression and the decline of railroad travel. After the war, new suburban lifestyles and the end of servants for all but the rich brought us instant everything—bricks of Birds Eye frozen spinach to be heated and served and Betty Crocker cake mixes.

Diners looking for the Big Meal went to prime-rib or lobster joints with little waterfalls out back, and the popover was the pinnacle of pastry. Ultimate praise was "you can't eat it all," as diners patted their stomachs and shuffled out to Buick station wagons monogrammed with yachting flags. They had never heard of heirloom tomatoes or extra-virgin olive oil. They cooked from Peg Bracken's "I Hate to Cook Book" in linoleum kitchens. They drank milk with dinner.

Read the full article at wsj.com »

New York Post :: Colonel Sanders and the American Dream

Colonel Sanders and the American Dream
By Josh Ozersky
Buy it Now

Cluck off!
KFC’s ‘Colonel’ was hardly a genteel man in a white suit
By LARRY GETLEN

Colonel Sanders and the American Dream
by Josh Ozersky
University of Texas Press

Around 1930, Harland Sanders ran a Shell gas station in a rough section of Corbin, Ky. The station prospered despite the rough locale — he kept a gun under his cash register for protection — and intense competition from a man named Matt Stewart, who ran a Standard Oil station down the road.
The men’s mutual animosity grew as Stewart painted over one of Sanders’ signs, and Sanders responded by threatening to “blow [Stewart’s] goddamn head off.”
Sanders repainted his sign but got word that Stewart was painting over it again just as he was meeting in his office with two Shell supervisors. The three men — all armed — raced to the scene, and Stewart drew his weapon and fired.

One of the Shell managers was killed instantly and Sanders “jumped into the breach and under withering fire grabbed his fallen comrade’s gun . . . [and] the future Colonel unloaded with true aim and hurled hot lead into Stewart’s shoulder.”

Read more at nypost.com »