Mayaland Cuisine. Get it now.

I suspect that many off you already know all of the work of E. N. Anderson. He’s the author of the classic, The Food of China, a history of China’s food from the prehistoric to the present. With Paul Buell and Charles Perry he produced an annotated edition of the great Mongol cookbook under the title A Soup for the Qan. I’m lucky enough to have a copy and for those of you who aren’t the good news is that it will be republished fairly shortly in a less expensive edition by Brill. Gene Anderson is also author of an introduction to food anthropology called Everyone Eats published in 2005.

Now he has put on the web a copy of his Mayan cook book called Mayaland Cuisine. It’s a fascinating treatment of the cuisine of southern Mexico. Although this cuisine like that of central Mexico belongs to the great family of maize and beans and chile cuisine, it is a distinct sub family with very different characteristics. One of Gene´s strengths is that he is very good at tracing the origins of recipes. In his book you will find his thoughts on which recipes show strong indigenous roots, and which ones have been modified by Spanish influence. I’d love to say much more, and perhaps I will in a future post, about many of my minor agreements and disagreements with his analysis. For now though I will simply suggest that if you have any interest in the cuisines of Mesoamerica, you take advantage of the fact that you can download this invaluable resource, with its many recipes and an extensive bibliography completely free.

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