Product Description

Pinpoint the major settlements around the Gulf of Mexico and you’ve got a road map to good times and great food. Start light in the Floribbean cafés of Key West, then it’s on to Tampa Bay for the Cuban nightlife of Ybor City and the Greek tavernas of Tarpon Springs. Old South fish fries and porch suppers fill lazy days from the Florida Panhandle through Alabama and Mississippi. A few miles and a world away, Louisiana is famous for its Creole and Cajun cuisines and pagan work ethic. Tex-Mex goes uptown in the cosmopolitan restaurants of Houston, while covering the waterfront in freewheeling cantinas and crab shacks from Galveston to South Padre Island. Go even deeper and you’ll taste its sophisticated tropical roots along the Mexican coast.

Gulf Coast Kitchens is your culinary guide to these incredible places. Here is true fusion cooking—French, Cajun, Spanish, Mexican, Asian, African, Italian—centuries in the making, where jambes and paellas morphed into jambalayas. Author Constance Snow gathers together the vast array of flavors this wide-reaching landscape offers, making for a collection of recipes so fresh, exciting, and diverse that your taste buds will be aquiver as you turn the pages, which are filled with all the Ya Ya energy and Creole color you would expect from such a melting pot of people and cultures.

Never before has the Gulf Coast received this kind of attention as a distinct culinary region. Like Southwestern cuisine and California style, the Gulf Coast’s blend of earthy seasonings, indigenous produce, and eclectic mix of flavors put it at the forefront of cooking trends. But forget trends—this food simply tastes great.

Gulf Coast Kitchens offers more than 200 recipes, including Pensacola Gaspachee Salad, Chilled Avocado and Crabmeat Soup, Calabaza con Pollo (Mexican Squash with Chicken), bayou standards like Creole Filé Gumbo and Jambalaya, and even drinks like the Blue Margarita and Louisiana Strawberry Lemonade. There are tips and tricks as well—from “Oyster Shucking 101” to “A Guide to Chiles” to “The Ins and Outs of Beer Tasting”—and beautiful photographs.

Snow’s writing is fresh and engaging and this book marks the appearance of a major new voice on the culinary scene. Join her tour in Gulf Coast Kitchens, one of the most interesting, lively, and tasty places on the planet.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1662556 in Books
• Published on: 2003-04-01
• Released on: 2003-04-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 400 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Snow, a New Orleans-based journalist, serves up spicy, fun fare in this lively tour of strong immigrant communities and deep-fried Southern roots. While there are sections for meats and vegetables, this is largely a seafood feast, with 11 different crab recipes from Artichoke and Crabmeat Balls to Little Crabcakes with Papaya Salsa to Vietnamese-Style Stuffed Crabs. Shrimp cocktails and salads also abound, as do seafood stews (Cajun Shrimp Stew), fries and paellas. More unusual dishes, like African-Style Smoked Turkey and Okra Gumbo, Florida Spiny Lobster with Cuban Garlic Sauce, and the Mexican-influenced Beef Tenderloin with Cocoa-Chile Rub, join standard Southern dishes such as Pecan-Encrusted Grouper and Fried Okra Salad. Recipes are flexible; for example, grits can be either cornmeal or stone ground grits, and the book, in generous Gulf Coast style, offers such favorites as Huevos Rancheros, Yuca Pancakes and Mayan Dude Ranch Margarita Pie. Recipes come with helpful explanations (how to slice a yuca) as well as history and local flavor, with sections on tupelo honey, a soft-shell crab farming venture in Louisiana and the use of pumpkins. While a bit uneven-there are fewer Caribbean recipes than Mexican and Cajun, and styles zigzag from traditional to fusion to overwrought (Gulf Seafood Lasagna)-this cookbook is a crowd pleaser with something for everyone.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Constance Snow's Gulf Coast Kitchens comprehensively addresses one section of the Atlantic Rim phenomenon. The Gulf Coast reflects the influence of American, Mexican, and Caribbean traditions. Snow takes Key West's familiar conch fritters and ratchets them up by adding some ginger to the batter. In a bow to the coast's more recent immigrants, Snow includes a recipe for Vietnamese spring rolls. Although most of Snow's recipes won't tax the reasonably competent home cook, she does venture into the realm of high New Orleans cooking with her sophisticated oysters in champagne sabayon with wilted spinach. At the other extreme, her version of jambalaya with simple sausage and chicken relies on only the finest, most flavorful meats for its success. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
CONSTANCE SNOW has been a journalist for more than fifteen years, writing for the New Orleans Times-Picayune and many other publications, including the Los Angeles Times and National Geographic Traveler. She is also the author of New Orleans Access, Caribbean Access, and Romantic Days and Nights in New Orleans. She lives in New Orleans.