A Tortilla Is Like Life: Food and Culture in the San Luis Valley of Colorado

By Carole M. Counihan

University of Texas Press



From the time Laura Esquivel’s well known novel Like Water for Chocolate was made into a film, food and meals have been presented as a means of communication that extends beyond the dinner table. A Tortilla Is Like Life is an excellent book about Hispanic food, recipes, and home remedies.



A Tortilla Is Like Life is an introduction to the unique Hispanic community of Antonito in San Luis Valley of Colorado. This small urban centre with a population of approximately 900 has Spanish, Mexican, and American Indian ancestry with some Anglophone influences. The town of Alamola, thirty miles away with a population ten times the size of Antonito, provides employment for people from nearby communities.



Carole Counihan, an anthropologist who settled in Antonito with her husband and two sons, presents the culture of the community by gathering food-centred interviews between 1996 and 2006 from nineteen women ages thirty-two to ninety-four, making fifty-five interviews in total. Two women in particular play a major role by providing information about the food, traditions, and culture of Antonito. The most active participants in Counihan’s study were Helen Ruybal, born in 1906, who she interviewed nineteen times, and Teddy Madrid, born in 1936, who was interviewed six times.



In this small community, gender arrangements surrounding cooking have changed over the years along with the archetype of the Chicano patriarchal family. Food sits at the heart of the household, contributing to the structure of families. A woman who prepares food is seen as the head of the family, and women construct relationships with men through cooking. Given that many women sell prepared food to make a living, domestic duties belong to both husband and wife. Through food, women establish a sense of their own identity, culture, and place in society. They create stories about food to preserve their legacy for future generations.



Certain foods encapsulate memories, rituals, beliefs, and traditions. Two things that are central to the Antonito diet (for both flavour and tradition) are red and green chilis, which are eaten on numerous occasions—with extended families, during birth rituals, at one's wedding, and after death—as they communicate love, nurturing, and care.



Counihan wants to enrich the understanding of Antonito’s history by presenting diverse women’s voices and creating a cultural mosaic revealing how they relate to food and community. She classifies her book as testimonio and has done a very thorough job researching. A Tortilla Is Like Life deals very well with the sense of cultural belonging felt by those living in a community where women’s identity is shaped by food.



Review by Anna Hamling

French Feasts: 299 Traditional Recipes for Family Meals & Gatherings

By Stéphane Reynaud
Stewart, Tabori, & Chang

In my humble opinion, French food is where it’s at. This is a cuisine responsible for the five mother sauces, a cuisine that wholeheartedly embraces flaky pastry, a cuisine that loves cream, cheese, and butter! Needless to say, I was incredibly excited to review French Feasts, and when it arrived, I was shocked to find a massive tome of a cookbook on my front porch. This is a serious book, so large it comes with a built-in bookmark. I’m happy to report that the recipes didn’t disappoint, and that the book itself is perhaps the most charming cookbook I’ve ever encountered.

Thumbing through a French cookbook that includes 299 recipes laid out over 400 pages is no easy feat. I didn’t know where to start, so I started at the most obvious place: the beginning. I curled up in bed with a highlighter and post-its and got to work looking over the book’s ten core sections: Charcuterie Anything Goes; Long Live Offal; A Dozen Eggs; What Lovely Vegetables; Moo, Bah, Oink; Poultry; Game Galore; Fish & Shellfish; A Bit of Cheese to Finish my Bread; and Sweet, Sweeter, Saccharine.

This loving opus to French food details the types of elaborate meals many French families share around their table; it even speaks fondly of what I like to refer to as “the nasty bits.” The first few chapters piqued my morbid curiosity. As an omnivore, I appreciate cultures that respect the animals they slaughter enough to make use of all their parts. That being said, I can’t bring myself to eat many of these slippery, slimy things. Perhaps I’m not very adventurous, but offal (entrails and internal organs) will never be my thing. So, as much fun as it was to read about making pig's head sausage in red wine, calf’s liver with lemon, and beef tongue in medeira sauce, I don’t think I’ll be feasting on any of those things anytime soon.

I knew I couldn’t test every recipe, so instead I focused on those that had ingredients that were affordable and easy to come by, as well as dishes that could seamlessly fit into my regular rotation of meals. I can’t recommend any dessert recipes quite yet, as I haven’t had the nerve to tackle them—not because they seem difficult, but because I’m afraid of what I might do if left alone with dozens of Chantilly cream pastries.

French Feasts takes a pretty straightforward, almost comically simple approach to food that we’ve all been told is difficult to prepare. I can clearly picture movie scenes where someone is anxiously checking their soufflé, only to find that it’s deflated in the oven. My cheese soufflé, as instructed by French Feasts, turned out perfectly. It really was like digging into a cheesy, ethereal cloud.

Next up, and one of my all time favorites, French onion soup. Despite my long-standing love of onions, I’d actually never made this soup at home. French Feasts’ version was ridiculously simple, though it was actually called “onion soup for digestion.” It only called for seven ingredients, including olive oil, salt, and pepper. Though it pained me to purchase Gruyere cheese at fifteen bucks a pound, I found a lovely woman at the farmer’s market who cut me a deal on a decent sized hunk. The soup was earthy and cheesy, and the caramelized onions were out of this world; it was basically heaven in a bowl.

Other standouts included hard-boiled eggs topped with homemade mayo all atop mixed greens, my first ever Niçoise salad (so briny, so salty, so complex, so delicious), and emulsion of creamed cauliflower that I now use in place of mashed potatoes.

Aside from the killer recipes, I have to take a second to gush about how charming this cookbook is. It’s in French and English and features drool-worthy color photographs and profiles of French food figures, such as butchers and bakers (no candlestick makers). There are also endearing illustrations and ingredient lists that include things like Basque country fandango CDs. This really is a cookbook that I will go back to over the years and explore over and over again… if all the butter doesn’t kill me first.

Review by Tina Vasquez