Hola amigos!!!! It’s done!!! It’s taken me SIX years but have finally finished cooking my way through Cantina by Paul Wilson. Not every recipe mind you, just the ones I wanted to cook. Sixty-one recipes. Which is more than enough I feel to pass judgement on this as a book. But first, let’s celebrate with some cake!
This was my birthday cake this year, a cake spent in the middle of lockdown when we were allowed no visitors. So a very solitary birthday. But we’re not here to talk about that. We’re here to talk about Cantina as exemplified by this recipe. Because everything that is wrong with this book is in this recipe. As is everything that is right. So let’s get to it.
A Rose is A Rose is A Rose
A rose may be a rose. And a rose by any other name may smell as sweet. (Ooh la la – look at me, with the Gertrude Stein and the Shakespeare refs in the one post!!!) But, apart from me showing off my fancy book learning, seriously, Cantina bandies about terms that have one meaning to mean something different.
(I have already waxed lyrical about how annoying this book on this point ere. So if you want to see my earlier rant click here.)
This is quite clearly a cake.
Except in Cantina where it is called a Lemon Aspen and lime Slice with Mescal Roasted Pineapple. Maybe I’m being really pedantic here but I’ve been cooking out of this book for 6 years. Believe me, I need to vent!
But everybody’s like Cristal, Maybach, diamonds on your timepiece…
You may have noticed my slice..erm cake is missing the Mescal Roasted Pineapple. The cheapest mezcal I could find was $55 a bottle. Most were in the range of $90-100. Of which I would use 80ml of a 750 ml bottle. I’m sure that over time I would be able to find other uses for the remaining 89% of that bottle.
This seems likely given the general state of the world
Seriously dropping that much money to use less than a tenth of the bottle for is frivolous at the best of times. Let alone during a global pandemic / economic crisis etc. Fair enough the book was published in 2014 so way before covid but the cost equation still stands. It’s a lot of money to drop on one recipe. And you know it’s not like you can use the remainder on the recipe for Chorizo with Apricot and Mezcal Aioli (again, not an aioli). Because when you read that recipe it contains no goddamn mezcal at all. None. Nyet. Cero.
I was so incensed at this the first time round I tweeted the publisher.
They responded that it was a typo.
Eerrrrrrmmmmmm … no.
Speaking from embarrassing experience, a typo is when you work for an accounting firm and you hand your boss a report that leaves the o out of the word accounting.
Twice.
Why’d you have to make things so complicated?
This slice is made up of a lemon cake, a lemon syrup, a mousse, a lime curd glaze and the mezcal roasted pineapple. Five components. Thirty-two ingredients if you make your own lime curd (I did not) and the pineapple (which as per above, I also did not make).
Included in these thirty two ingredients is 100g of lemon aspen. Do you know what lemon aspen is? Nope, me either. According to Cantina’s glossary, it is
“A small, pale yellow fruit, with a lemon flavour and aroma and spongy flesh…it is available from bush food specialists and gourmet greengrocers”.
Let’s just put aside the fact that it was neither available from gourmet greengrocers or bush food specialists when I was looking for it.
Because you know what else is a small pale yellow fruit with a lemon flavour and aroma?
A lemon.
Readily available all over the damn place.
I also made the soft shell crab tacos with guacamole, shaved fennel and sweetcorn salad for my birthday dinner. Softshell crabs weren’t available for love or money so I made these with lobster tails. Because you know, it was my birthday and dammit if I wasn’t going to get fancy!!!
It’s delightful, it’s delicious, it’s de-lovely
You know the absolute worst thing about Cantina? It’s cheffy, it’s pretentious, it’s fiddly, pretty much everything was a pain in the arse to cook. But when they worked, which was most of the time? They were so damn tasty that they almost made all the effort worthwhile. So, whilst I part of me really wants to consign this book to the second-hand shop pronto, I am going to hang onto it for a little while longer!
Both the cake/slice and the tacos were mouthwateringly delicious, even if they were also a lot of work to prepare!
The standout recipe for me from Cantina was the Heirloom tomato escabeche. It was so good!!!!!
I have a challenge with myself that I will reduce either through binning or donating 1000 things in the next 12 months. Twenty days in I am up to 190 so it is going well. But there’s a long way to go I may need to put Cantina on the donation pile later in the year!
Next up on my Tasty Reads book cook though Silvia Colloca’s Made in Italy. I only have about ten recipes left to cook from it so I should easily be done by the end of the year. And based on everything I have already cooked it is pretty down to earth which is exactly what I needed after the high-end madness that was Cantina!
So tell me, do you have a cookbook you find infuriating? What was frustrating about it? Did you keep it or give it away?
And have a great week!
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