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Learn to COOK - Tastes Like Cuba: An Exile's Hunger for Home
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List Price: $15.00
Our Price: $11.70
Your Save: $ 3.30 ( 22% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Gotham
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 920
EAN: 9781592404056
ISBN: 1592404057
Label: Gotham
Manufacturer: Gotham
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 368
Publication Date: 2008-10-07
Publisher: Gotham
Studio: Gotham
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Editorial Reviews:
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In the tradition of Ruth Reichl’s Tender at the Bone, an acclaimed playwright recounts his life as an exile—and the food that helped lead him back home.
Born into a well-to-do family in Cuba in 1953, Eduardo Machado saw firsthand the effects of the rising Castro regime. When he and his brother were sent to the United States on one of the Peter Pan flights of 1961, they did not know if they would ever see their parents or their home again. From his experience living in exile in Los Angeles to becoming an actor, director, playwright and professor in New York, Machado explores what it means to say good-bye to the only home one’s ever known, and what it means to be a Latino in America today. Filled with delicious recipes and powerful tales of family, loss, and self discovery, Tastes Like Cuba delivers the story of Eduardo’s rich and delectable life—reminding us that no matter where we go, there is no place that feels (and tastes) better than home.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Emotional and Inspiring True Life Story - And Some Good Recipes Too
Comment: The author had me hooked from page one. The writing is excellent, and my only complaint is the fact that the author included Cuban recipes in the main text of the book - it was a little bit distracting, and would have been more useful if the recipes were all in one place, at the end of the book.
However, the story that Eduardo Machado tells is wonderful, detailed and rich with memory about his Cuban childhood, and the significance that familiar foods and traditions have in our lives, especially for those who can't go home. For some American immigrants, the home country is part of their lives - they can fly back home easily, knowing that things will be the way they left them; friends will still be there, and so will most of their relatives.
For refugees, the situation is different - they know they can never go back home, and the new country is their home country. Machado's longing for food and all that is familiar will ring true to any reader who has experienced a life-altering situation, one in which things will never be the same as they were before. I completely understand the author's fascination and near-obsession with the details of food, spices and aromas.
The author's description of the downtown Los Angeles Grand Central Market is so accurate, and I have been told by many people that visiting this open-air market for the first time made them feel like they were back home again. I highly recommend this book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Tastes Like Cuba
Comment: Just finished reading this story..It is fantastic, has all, loved it. I related to it. The food, the story, the pain of Cuba..
Customer Rating:
Summary: Self-Absorbed and Annoying
Comment: I have read many Cuban exile memoirs as well as those of Polish, Russian and other exiles groups. I also have several cookbook/memoirs about "old Cuba." This memoir is really one of the most irritating of the lot. Mr Machado goes on and on about loving his homeland and yearning for the taste of its food etc. That is fine. But he also goes on and on about his issues with his family - especially about his resentment towards his parents for sending him as a "Peter Pan" child to the US (Operation Peter Pan was a way for Cuban parents to send their unaccompanied children out of Cuba under the auspices of Catholic charities. This was at a time when parents in Cuba believed that their children would be rounded up and shipped to the Soviet Union to be "re-educated." Out of desperation, they were willing to send their children and then hoped to follow them). Mr Machado at one point rants about how they sent him and his 5 yr old brother just so they could make sure he grew up the way they thought he should. Well, one would wonder at any parent who willingly separated from their child for any other reason except to save them from a fate they viewed as horrible. This is just one example of a general trend to make rather vicious statements about his family, the US govt., other Cuban exiles (especially in Miami) and anyone else that disagrees with his view. It wasn't that gripping a memoir and the it wasn't really a great food related book. I would say that if you want a better Cuban exile memoir, try Pablo Medina's Exiled Memories or Gustavo Perez-Firmat's Next Year in Cuba. And if you really want have a useful cookbook that includes lots of memories and background flavor, then try A Taste of Old Cuba by Maria Josefa Lluria de O'Higgins or Memories of a Cuban Kitchen by Mary Urrutia Randelman. Both are excellent and authentic and filled with family photos and stories. Oh and the Nitza Villapol book(Cocina Criolla or Cocina al Minuto)from the 1950's which Mr Machado mentions is readily available in reprints -- you don't have to go secretly to Cuba and look in a second hand book stall.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Tasty Treat
Comment: Eduardo Machado wrote a wonderful memoir of his early life in Cuba, to his young adult life in Miami and then Los Angeles, and then in his later years in New York and back in California.
His food recollections of his early days of Newspaper Soup, Bistec Empanizado, Arroz con Pollo, etc., he describes in such delicious detail.
His journey from Cuba to Hialeah and then to Miami pulled at my heart-strings. When him and his family got to Los Angeles, he wrote about many incidents. One in particular affected me very much. Him and his family went shopping at the Central Market in the valley. They were trying to find the foods they had grown up with in Cuba.
I could go on with this review, but in short, this book was one of the best memoirs in the food/immigration subjects.
Eduardo, thank you very much for a wonderful, tasty, and can't put it down read. Bravo!
Customer Rating:
Summary: From Cuba to the US and back again
Comment: Eduardo Machado came to the US in 1961 as part of Operation Peter Pan, a program that transported about 14,000 children from Cuba to the United States after Batista fell. His grandfather tells the young Machado that his arroz con pollo "will taste just like Cuba." Machado thinks: "How do you make a meal taste like a place? I should have asked him directly. Instead, I spent the rest of my life looking for the answer."
I really enjoyed the story of how Machado finally reconciled his sense of loss for his homeland with the new life he created for himself in the United States. And, as a foodie myself, I enjoyed how he told his story with the help of food.
Example: Machado loved his grandmother's cafe con leche. "I was only 5 years old, but I knew one thing for sure. All I had to do was dunk the bread into the cup. Chew, sip and heaven in the morning was possible."
Fidel Castro destroyed the family: "The savior had become the tyrant. Fidel was now the source of all suffering for my family, more than Batista ever was." He says he felt contempt for his family, then guilt. Velveeta sandwiches he was forced to eat didn't help matters.
In the end Machado goes back to Cuba as a middle aged man, and makes peace with Cuba, his family and perhaps with himself.
He eats a tamale and wonders if it was as good as the ones he remembered as a kid. "And then it hit me. I didn't care. I didn't want to compare them. ... I no longer wanted to be the kind of Cuban that let what was lost get in the way of the beauty and the joy and life and food that was staring me in the face."
An interesting and insightful memoir, with some useful recipes for Cuban food.
Robert C. Ross 2008
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