Corn & Ember

Eighty recipes for Mexican cooking as its own subject rather than a chapter in somebody else's book. It begins where the food does, with dry corn and slaked lime, and it is organized by region — because a mole from Oaxaca and a mole from Puebla are not variations on one recipe, they are two arguments about what a mole is.

Recipes

Pages

PDF

Format

$25 Add to cart Or the whole shelf, $299

Try 48 recipes free — two from every book, including this one.

What's inside

01 10 recipes

Nixtamal: Corn, Lime and the Grinding Stone

Everything after this rests on it.

02 10 recipes

Salsa as a Craft

Run across a dozen dried chiles.

03 10 recipes

Oaxaca: the Mole Country

The mole family is clearest here.

04 10 recipes

Puebla, Mexico City and the Central Plateau

From the convent and the street counter.

05 10 recipes

The Yucatán and the Maya South

Sour orange, achiote, habanero, and the pit oven.

06 10 recipes

The Coasts: Veracruz, Sinaloa, Baja

All quicker than a mole.

07 10 recipes

The North: Beef, Wheat and the Grill

Each one says which side of the border it sits on.

08 10 recipes

The Sweet Counter and the Drinks Nobody Shakes

Mostly not baked.

Sample recipe · page 15

Tortillas on a Comal, and the Three Signs

Ingredients

750 g fresh masa
2 tbsp water, as needed
1 tsp fine salt

Method

Heat the comal until a drop of water skitters and vanishes. Too cool is the commonest fault and it gives a pale, leathery result.
Roll 30 g balls and press each between two sheets of plastic, then peel the plastic off rather than lifting the tortilla.
First sign: lay it down and leave it 15 seconds, until the edges go matt and it lifts without sticking.
Second sign: turn it and cook 45 seconds, until pale brown freckles appear underneath.
Third sign: turn it back for 15 seconds and press the center gently with a cloth. It should balloon.
Stack them in a cloth as they come off. They steam each other soft, and a tortilla eaten straight off the comal is stiff.

Page 15 of Corn & Ember — Tortillas on a Comal, and the Three Signs recipe with dual metric weights and steps

All eighty carry a metric weightMasa is a hydration problem before it is anything else, and a cup of it weighs what the day's corn decides. Every recipe is written in grams and milliliters so the ratios survive the translation.

Twelve dried chiles, described one at a timeThe second chapter opens with a reference page: what each of twelve tastes of, how hot it runs, and which ones genuinely swap for which. The other seventy-nine recipes lean on it rather than repeating it.

It says where the shortcut is honestThe first chapter makes masa from dry corn and lime. Its last recipe says plainly when a bag of masa harina is fine, what it does badly, and how to get the most out of it — because most people will use the bag most of the time.