Description
Mary Ancho Davis invites everyone to join her at her mother’s table as she recalls her family’s traditions and history and shares special memories from her mother Dominga’s kitchen. From huge cream puffs filled with heavy cream skimmed from the top of raw milk, to recollections of ringing the large iron triangle hanging from a tree branch outside the kitchen door, in Chorizos in an Iron Skillet Ancho Davis offers wonderful details about life and meals on her family’s Basque ranch. When Ancho Davis’s mother immigrated to the United States from Vizcaya, Spain, she brought many traditional Basque family recipes. Soon after arriving in Nevada, she realized that her ancestors’ culinary traditions would need to be altered and adapted in her new home. No longer were standard ingredients readily available, as they had been in the Old Country. Dominga also learned to adjust favorite recipes to accommodate the tastes of friends, neighbors, and ranch hands not familiar with Basque flavors. In this charming cookbook, Mary Ancho Davis traces a path from Old Country traditional dishes to their modern versions as she shares her family’s recipes and details the evolution of Basque cooking in America. A personal cookbook from one Basque family, Chorizos in an Iron Skillet is also an engaging cultural study of culinary traditions that spans several generations of Basque immigration to the American West. With recipes for everything from Chicken with Chocolate and Dominga’s Basque Chorizos to Dried Apricot Pie, these Basque ranch dishes offer a multitude of delicious ideas for down-home cooking. Illustrated with photographs from the Ancho family, plus helpful advice on ingredients and cooking techniques, Chorizos in an Iron Skillet is the perfect kitchen companion for filling your home with the flavors and aromas of Basque cooking.

Reviews
"The range of recipes here and the use of many ingredients from cans, bottles, and frozen boxes create the flavor of an auxiliary-club cookbook—a delightful bit of western Americana marked by an impulse from the age of Betty Crocker to go global with international dishes . . ." —Frank Bergon, Gastronomica, Summer 2002

"Mary Ancho Davis . . . honors both the history of her community and her ancestors by filling this volume with recipes and recollections from the past and present for her descendants to savor in the future." —Marilyn Abraham, Southwest BookViews, Spring 2002