This week we look at how cooking can reconnect you with your culinary and family heritage. Author and cook Karla Zazueta tells us about the distinctiveness of northern Mexican cuisine and her memories of her childhood in Baja California. Plus, Monocle’s David Plaisant meets Marie Mitchell to gather ingredients for recipes from her highly personal cookbook, ‘Kin’. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hello and welcome to the Menu Monocle Radio's food and drink program.
I'm your host, Chiara Rimela.
This week is all about how cooking is a powerful tool to connect you to your culinary and family heritage.
First up, author Carla Zadzueta tells us about the distinctiveness of North Mexican cuisine and how it brings up memories of her childhood in Baja California.
You know, I've been living here for the last 20 years until now.
I still cook the same dishes that I grew up eating over and over again.
And now my children are growing up eating the food that I grew up with.
Also on the program, we head to North London to meet Mary Mitchell and gather the ingredients for some recipes from her highly personal cookbook kin.
Having to or wanting?
Not even having.
Desperately wanting to create this sort of legacy project for both of my brother and my mum meant that I kind of had to step away.
And there were many pockets of time where I'd have to stop and step away in order to be able to allow myself to come back and to come back authentically.
All that here on a menu on Monaco Radio.
Cooking the food of your heritage is always a way to connect to the past and your roots.
But for Mexican author Carla Zazueta, it holds an even stronger significance.
Having grown up in Baja California, the author moved to the UK some 20 years ago, but she has never stopped preparing and enjoying the dishes of her home.
Many of them carry precious, distinct memories of her own family and childhood.
But they also tell a story of the peculiarities of Northern Mexican cuisine and how, across its wildly different regions, it's shaped by its varying climate and geography.
Her latest book, Nortegna, is an autobiography of sorts, but via the medium of carne, asada, tamales and tortillas.
I sat down with Zadzueta in the studio to talk about why this title is a way to make sure those traditions and techniques are passed on to new audiences and new generations.