Genuine Mexican Cheeses
Genuine Mexican cheeses is the translation of Los Quesos Mexicanos Genuinos, co-authored by Fernando Cervantes, Abraham Villegas, Alfredo Cesín, and Angélica Espinoza, all of them leading scholars and researchers.
Now I’ve always been puzzled by Mexican cheeses. The names in different Mexican cookbooks, whether for an English or a Mexican public, don’t seem to map on to the names in the market or the supermarket. It’s not clear what their relation is to Spanish cheeses. Or to the cheeses of other migrant groups to Mexico. Now we have an authoritative look by the best available scholars at the cheeses of Mexico. Cheers.
As any reviewer’s first duty is to tell you what’s in a book, here’s what it offers:
a short history of dairying in Mexico
an analysis of the current state of dairying in Mexico
an overview of artisanal cheese making in Mexico (that is, of Mexican cheeses. It does not deal with the growing number of artisanal cheese makers turning out French-style goat cheeses, other European-style cheeses, and so on. I’ll talk about some of these in subsequent blogs).
a description of the 32 main cheeses they believe to be genuinely Mexican (with photographs), where they are made (with maps), technical cheese makers’s description of how they are made and their chemical characteristics, and how they are used. Here’s a typical spread with the photo of a queso en tenate on the left and the introduction to queso adobera that Bob Mrotek mentioned on the right.
I learned more about Mexican cheese history from this book than from anything else I have read. It’s an afficionado’s book of course, not a cook book. If you fall in that group, you’ll want to know how to get it. I ordered it on line from one of Mexico’s main bookstores, Gandhi. They do ship overseas. Be warned that this is not Amazon and you will need to persist.
For the majority of us who are not cheese-making fanatics, wait for my next post on the counter intuitive and thought provoking ideas I took away from this book.
hola buenos dias soy estudiante de alimentos me gustaria obtener mayor informacion del queso tenate; ya que en mi estado igual se elabora pero no es muy conocida, pues estoy llevando una investigacion acerca de este queso.
espero su contestacion saludos
hola soy estudiante de tecnologia de alimentos y estoy haciendo una investigacion del queso tenate ya que se elabora en mi estado pero no es reconocida, megustaria obtener mas informacion.
saludos y espero su contestacion
Hola Eugenia. La tecnologia de alimentos me fascina. Pero no estoy experto y desgraciadamente no se nada del queso tenate. En este momento ando en Espana y no tengo aceso a mi biblioteca. Mi sugerencia es que busques Chapingo en el internet porque alla trabajan varios expertos en quesos. Suerte!