An Overview

To bring Oaxacan food to life in your kitchen, you must not only find the right ingredients but welcome the challenge of discovering them. I could try to skim over this crucial fact, but I would only be misleading you. My recipes will repeatedly call for seasonings or sometimes basic materials that U.S. cooks may never have seen before in a cookbook, even a Mexican cookbook.

I hasten to reassure you that what this cooking requires is within your powers. In the first place, many of my recipes require only familiar materials and simple preparations. Secondly, and more excitingly, dozens of ingredients that may sound remote and difficult to find are now regularly coming into the country with waves of immigrants from southern Mexico and other tropical regions.