Cookbooks

Cookbooks written about Guatemalan food:

the shelf is short and much of it is recent. Chef Mirciny Moliviatis’s Viviendo la receta travels the country chapter by chapter, through salt, maize, tamales, coffee and Holy Week, and won a Gourmand award. So did Euda Morales’s Más que un tesoro, which tells the family stories behind the recipes in a way children can follow. Amalia Moreno-Damgaard’s Amalia’s Guatemalan Kitchen is written in English for home cooks outside the country, which makes it an easy gift for a relative abroad. Older, La cocina tradicional guatemalteca, edited by Luis Luján Muñoz, sorts its recipes by region, from kak’ik turkey soup and coconut seafood soup in the north to offal stew in the south and loroco tamales in the east. Most of what changes hands is imported. Baking and bread manuals are the ones people wear out, and the slim recipe books written for one air fryer or pressure cooker are worth having only if you own that machine. Guides to cooking on a camp stove are filed with outdoor books, and books on feeding a baby that are more advice than recipes sit better among parenting books.

Baking books written for sea level, used in the highlands:

nearly every baking book assumes a kitchen near the coast. In the capital, Huehuetenango or San Marcos the air is thin enough that a cake made exactly to the recipe rises fast and then sinks, so highland bakers cut the baking powder, add a little liquid and bake hotter. Water boils cooler up there too, which is why beans and stews take longer than the book says and why a pressure-cooker recipe book earns its place in a highland kitchen. A book with high-altitude notes, or a used copy whose last owner pencilled in the changes that worked, saves you a few collapsed cakes. In Escuintla or Puerto Barrios the recipes work as printed. English-language books from the United States measure in cups and Fahrenheit, which matters for a cake far more than for a stew.

Imported cookbooks and what a clean copy holds on to:

an imported illustrated cookbook runs around Q250 to Q400 new, with the big chef hardbacks, a Jamie Oliver for instance, at the top of that. A used one is priced by its pages. A copy that opens clean at every recipe still sells for clearly less than new, because the same title is sitting on a shelf in the city. A Guatemalan cookbook whose print run has gone has no new copy to undercut it, so a clean one holds its price far better.

Reading the stains on a second-hand cookbook:

a few splashes of oil or sauce are normal, and they mark the recipes that worked. Pages fused by syrup or caramel are another matter: they tear when you pull them apart. Open the book flat and see where it falls open, because the pages around a much-used recipe are the first to work loose from the spine. Check a handful of entries in the index against the page numbers, since favourite recipes get cut out and the gap only shows when you go looking for one. Clippings and handwritten recipes tucked between the pages are often the best thing in it.

Clearing a kitchen shelf of recipe books:

cookbooks come up when a household moves, when someone starts cooking from a phone, or when a cookery student finishes a course and no longer needs the technique manuals. Give the title, the author and the language, say whether the measures are in grams or cups, and photograph two of the most-used spreads as well as the cover, because a buyer judges a cookbook by its pages. For an appliance recipe book, name the machine it was written for. Anyone who bakes in the highlands will ask whether the cake recipes were ever tried up there, so if you adjusted them, say how.