Rancho Cooking: Mexican and Californian Recipes
Author: Jacqueline Higuera McMahan
Popular cookbook author McMahan has written the only book available on authentic California-Mexican food. A direct descendent of Spanish settlers, she takes cooks into the heart of the original California cuisine; a combination of Mexican and Spanish dishes that developed in the kitchens of California ranchos over the past two centuries. Rancho Cooking provides 125 mouthwatering recipes along with family stories and historical anecdotes about the culinary trail north.
Author Biography: Jacqueline Higuera McMahan is an eighth generation Californian whose family arrived in California in 1775 and lived on one of the last Spanish land grant ranchos. McMahan is the author of six cookbooks, including California Rancho Cooking and The Salsa Cookbook (both from Olive Press), and writes the "South to North" column for the San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in the San Gabriel Mountains of California.
Library Journal
McMahan is a descendiente of one of California's original rancho families, Spaniards who came to California via Mexico in the late 18th century. In her latest book (some of the material is based on text from her California Rancho Cooking, but this is more a new book than a revised edition), she offers many stories about her grandmama and other members of her extended family, along with 150 recipes. Rancho food combined elements of both Spanish and Mexican cooking, using Latin American ingredients such as tomatoes, chiles, and corn and European ones like olives, figs, and olive oil. Sidebars and narratives "The Grandest Barbecue of All," "Maria Higuera's Wedding" are interspered throughout the recipes, and there are full-page color photographs of some of the delectable dishes. A unique look at a culture that no longer exists, this is recommended for most libraries. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Internet Book Watch
This collection of Mexican and Californian recipes provides old-style recipes tweaked by the author with dishes ranging from Squash Blossom Quesadillas and Braised Pot Roast With Beer to Bouillabaisse Chili and Roman Artichokes. A centerfold collection of color photos adds interest and finished dishes to a fine treatise on Mexican/California culinary blends.
Book about: Direction internationale :Dimensions Trans-culturelles
Hunger: An Unnatural History
Author: Sharman Apt Russell
Every day, we wake up hungry. Every day, we break our fast. Hunger is both a natural and an unnatural human condition. In Hunger, Sharman Apt Russell explores the range of this primal experience. Step by step, Russell takes us through the physiology of hunger, from eighteen hours without food to thirty-six hours to three days to seven days to thirty days. In quiet, elegant prose, she asks a question as big as history and as everyday as skipping lunch: How does hunger work?
Publishers Weekly
Russell's playful survey of the effects of hunger, which moves inexorably toward a wider moral meditation on starvation, suggests, "Hunger is a country we enter every day, like a commuter across a friendly border." Observing that "not eating seems to be innately religious," Russell (Anatomy of a Rose) explores the biochemical and cultural dimensions of hunger, from the stunts of "hunger artists" to the practices of fasting ascetics and so-called "miracle maids" (virginal women who appeared not to require food), touching on her own abortive experience of fasting. Turning to the history of political protest, Russell describes the force-feeding of British suffragettes and the strategic fasts of Mahatma Gandhi. She captures the limits of human cruelty and frailty in detailing the medical studies of starvation conducted in the Warsaw Ghetto; famine and cannibalism in the Ukraine and China; and the findings of the "Minnesota Experiment," which studied how semistarvation influences behavior. Addressing the stark facts of current world hunger, Russell reports on the medical challenges of reintroducing food to the chronically malnourished, on the iconic image of the starving child and on the efforts of humanitarian agencies to end world hunger. With its expert blend of scientific reportage, world history and moral commentary, Russell's work is informative and haunting. (Sept.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
KLIATT
Hunger is a serious look at what the author calls "an unnatural history of hunger." Russell is a natural science writer who looks at her subject from all angles, from the weird—performers who made their living by fasting for an audience—to a physiological description of how our bodies react to hunger over time, starting with a skipped breakfast to 30-day fasts. She also looks at the political aspects of hunger, from self-imposed hunger fasts to hunger used as a weapon of war. She includes research done by doctors in the Warsaw Ghetto, who tried to give value to their suffering by studying the effects of hunger, and examines other historical times of hunger, including the Irish famine and the Dutch Hunger Winter. She writes about our well-publicized response to hunger in some countries and our ignorance of it in other situations and what we've learned to combat hunger. She looks at its psychological aspects, including anorexia nervosa and the effect of living in a society with almost too much food available when we know that others are starving. Her "Selected Notes and References" at the end are typical of the rest of the book: easily read, they are helpful in explaining some technical issues and get to the heart of each topic. Somehow Russell manages to be a scientist, historian, social commentator, and political scientist in a sensitive, non-preachy, but motivating way.
Library Journal
In a country plagued with obesity problems, the notion of hunger elicits haunting images of the malnourished in parts of the Third World. Natural science writer Russell (Anatomy of a Rose) expands our understanding of starvation, examining its various manifestations. Fasting can be a fashionable choice for the dieter, while for the religious the denial of food is largely inspirational, and constant hunger caused by genetic disorders destroys the possibility of a normal life. Russell also looks into the primary causes of starvation afflicting too many large regions of the world, such as natural catastrophes, fickle weather, and political unrest. And she addresses the repercussions of hunger-according to one study, though the body can still function under reduced caloric intake, personality and emotional stability suffer damage. But food alone is not the panacea: as rescuers working with the famished are now discovering, special diets are necessary to repair abused digestive and metabolic systems. Russell's readable account is a provocative blend of science and anthropology, although her gut-wrenching tales of starvation are best read on an empty stomach. Suitable for public and academic libraries.-Rita Hoots, Sacramento City Coll., Davis, CA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
School Library Journal
Adult/High School-A fascinating, multilayered analysis. Russell describes the physiological effects of hunger, starting with what occurs in the digestive system while the subject is watching a commercial for the Olive Garden restaurant and ending with the body's processing of the last bit of pasta and anchovy. Her discussion of the biological aspects is concise, interesting, and free from scientific jargon. After covering what happens when the body has food, Russell gives a sobering account of what occurs in the mind and body when food is withheld. Using fasting periods from 18 hours to 30 days, the author shows the extraordinary ways in which the deprived body tries to save itself. Her choices for the historical overview of hunger include hunger artists, religious and politically motivated fasting, therapeutic fasting, famines, experiments on starvation, anorexia, and efforts to combat world hunger. The short essays on the Warsaw Ghetto, the potato famine in Ireland, Colin Turnbull's studies of the Ik tribe, and the industrialization of China are so interesting and well written that they invite further research. This is an important topic for teens to explore. As Russell points out, one in 10 Americans lives in a food-insecure household. The lasting biological and psychological effects of hunger on children are critical.-Kathy Tewell, Chantilly Regional Library, Fairfax County, VA Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
An engrossing account of the myriad aspects of hunger, from its psychological and physical effects on the body to the spiritual, therapeutic and political motivations for fasting. Russell (Writing/ Western New Mexico University), author of The Anatomy of a Rose (2001) and other books on natural history, undertaken a period of fasting to learn firsthand what real hunger feels like. Hunger, she reports, is as big as history and as intimate as the self. Besides providing disturbing statistics on hunger and riveting accounts of famines, she explores the physiology of digestion and the mystery of anorexia nervosa, delves into the curious practice of competitive fasting and reports on the use of hunger strikes by Gandhi, English suffragettes and Irish Republicans. Perhaps the most fascinating sections of her book are her accounts of hunger studies. One amazing study was conducted by Jewish doctors trapped inside the Warsaw ghetto in World War II, when official Nazi policy was starvation of the Jews. The results of the project, which ended in 1943 when the inhabitants were liquidated and the ghetto razed, were smuggled out to aryan doctors, published in French in 1946 and remain today the most detailed portrait of extreme starvation. Another study conducted in 1944 and 1945 in Minnesota used conscientious objectors as medical guinea pigs, putting young men on a semi-starvation diet for six months and then refeeding them in order to determine the most effective and economical way to help starving populations at the war's end. Also noteworthy are descriptions of how hunger shapes human culture. Here, Russell turns to the work of anthropologist Colin Turnbull, who studied the starving Ik people ofUganda and Kenya in the 1960s and created a chilling portrait of human behavior under the stress of chronic hunger. Following her account of relief efforts around the globe, her penultimate chapter includes the recommendations of the U.N. Task ForceAgainst Hunger for reducing hunger in the world. While the subject is often somber, the presentation is one of verve and style-and the end-of-book notes provide a useful guide for readers whose interest has been piqued.
Table of Contents:
| 1 | The Hunger Artists | 1 |
| We have always been hungry | |
| Hunger artists | |
| The portrait of the artist as a hungry young man | |
| Famine and the gates of grief | |
| Calorie restriction and fasting for health | |
| The intimacy of hunger | |
| 2 | Eighteen Hours | 17 |
| The process of digestion | |
| Signals of satiety | |
| Our "second brain" | |
| Ghrelin and leptin | |
| The transformation of the world | |
| Appetite and aversion | |
| Skipping breakfast | |
| 3 | Thirty-Six Hours | 27 |
| Gender differences and short-term hunger | |
| Our savings bank of calories | |
| A shortage of glucose | |
| Obesity research | |
| Genetic disorders of overeating | |
| Obesity and poverty | |
| Poverty and hunger | |
| 4 | Seven Days | 37 |
| Seventy-two hours without food | |
| The liver | |
| The magic of ketones, the miracle of ketosis | |
| Fasting in religion | |
| Fasting saints and miracle maids | |
| A renaissance of Christian fasting | |
| My fast | |
| The seven-day fast, matching Heaven with Heaven | |
| 5 | Thirty Days | 53 |
| Tanner's "starvation comedy" | |
| The first scientific study of a thirty-day fast | |
| A cure for obesity | |
| Fasting for health | |
| A therapeutic fasting center | |
| Calorie restriction in monkeys and Biospherians | |
| Hormesis and intermittent fasting | |
| 6 | The Hunger Strike | 73 |
| Hunger as theatre | |
| The English suffragettes revive an old tradition | |
| Mahatma Gandhi | |
| Ten Irish Republicans | |
| Medical ethics in a hunger strike | |
| 7 | The Hunger Disease Studies | 95 |
| The Warsaw Ghetto | |
| An ambitious research project | |
| Results of the hunger disease studies | |
| The first general conference on hunger disease | |
| Deportations and liquidation | |
| The fate of the scientists | |
| 8 | The Minnesota Experiment | 113 |
| Hungry people and the end of World War II | |
| The use of conscientious objectors in the Minnesota Experiment | |
| The physical and psychological effects of semi-starvation | |
| Unexpected problems in refeeding | |
| Consequences of the experiment | |
| 9 | The Anthropology of Hunger | 137 |
| Hunger frustration in the Siriono of Bolivia, Gurage of Ethiopia, and Kalauna of Papua New Guinea | |
| Colin Turnbull and the African Ik, the dissolution of family | |
| Three social responses to widespread hunger | |
| Cannibalism | |
| The largest recorded famine in history | |
| Hunger and child death in the cane workers of Brazil | |
| The medicalization of hunger | |
| 10 | Anorexia Nervosa | 157 |
| Anorexia mirabilis, anorexia nervosa | |
| The involuntary effects of starvation | |
| Similarities and differences between anorectics and the Minnesota Experiment volunteers | |
| Anorexia nervosa as adaptation | |
| Multiple theories | |
| 11 | Hungry Children | 169 |
| The Dutch Hunger Winter | |
| Starvation and fetal development | |
| Marasmus and kwashiorkor | |
| The debate over protein and micronutrients | |
| New ways to refeed malnourished children | |
| Children as the icon of famine | |
| How hunger affects cognition and growth | |
| How to help a hungry child | |
| 12 | Protocols of Famine | 187 |
| Baidoa, Somalia | |
| New ways to refeed malnourished adults | |
| The will to live | |
| Vonzula, Liberia | |
| Famine and disease | |
| Wau, Sudan | |
| Triage | |
| Home-based care and therapeutic feeding centers | |
| Ready-to-eat therapeutic food | |
| Pilot programs | |
| 13 | An and To Hunger | 205 |
| Social causes of hunger | |
| Epiphany | |
| The United Nations Hunger Task Force and the eight Millennium Development Goals | |
| The facts of world hunger | |
| Three strategies to end world hunger | |
| 14 | The Top of the Mountain | 215 |
| Hunger and Saint Patrick | |
| Legal and moral uses of fasting in early Ireland | |
| A walk up Croagh Patrick | |
| Irish history | |
| An Gorta Mor of 1845-50 | |
| Ancient troscad and the power of hunger | |
| Selected References and Notes | 231 |
| Acknowledgements | 261 |
