Cookbook-as-Food Memoir
No matter where you come from, there will always be one food that is a part of your life—the flavor of comfort, where just a taste represents home.
In this cookbook-as-food-memoir, you’ll discover the sweet soul of real dulce de leche, learning how to make the traditional recipe as well as several variations. Then cook your way through the day with dulce de leche—whether homemade or store bought—from breakfast muffins, medialunas and panqueques to cocktail-hour picadas to dinner entrees to pies, alfajores and divine layer cakes. Recipe after recipe, you’ll taste how a few spoonfuls of creamy, gently sweet dulce de leche can enhance the flavor of grains, fruits, vegetables, cheese and even poultry. In fact, you might find it becomes a new family tradition.
I wrote “Dulce de Leche” for people like me, who like to read coobooks like novels, regardless of their skill in the kitchen, or whether or not they cook or simply enjoy eating good food.
“Dulce de Leche” shares more than recipes. It invites the reader to take a seat at my Grandma Dorita’s kitchen table in La Plata, Argentina, where dulce de leche and the memories and sensations it evokes mixes with love, loss, culture and tradition. By sharing my stories, my hope is that dulce de leche will become more familiar and commonplace in the United States and that readers’ will soon come to appreciate that dulce de leche doesn’t have to be gourmet and is worthy of its own spot in the pantry and weekly grocery lists—with no substitute acceptable.
Make sure to check out the gallery of recipe images below! While I am in love with Kate Forrester’s, Fileteado-style illustrations, as a home cook, I always appreciate having a photo I can reference when trying out a new recipe. Some of the images are my own (you’ll surely be able to easily tell these apart!), while others are from spectacularly talented photographers, including Kathy Wolfe (who beautifully shot the majority of the recipes), Duane Rieder, and Erin Kelly. I’ve organized the recipe images by chapter, in the same order they appear in the cookbook.
From my kitchen to yours, ¡Buen Provecho!
