Ties to Mexico, three ways

Long before being named the James Beard finalist as best chef in the Southwest, Houston chef Hugo Ortega was a kid growing up in the slums of Mexico City.

In his new book, “Hugo Ortega’s Street Food of Mexico” (Bright Sky Press, $34.95), Ortega revisits the city of his youth, where he got his first job in the food business: selling flan at one of the Distrito Federal’s many vibrant markets.

At 17, Ortega moved to Houston, where one of his cousins was living. “I arrived in Houston knowing just one person,” he writes. “I had no money, no job, only the determination to make a better life for myself.”

He started working as a dishwasher, then a busboy, and he eventually found his way to Backstreet Cafe, where he worked his way up from dishwasher to executive chef. In 2002, he and wife Tracy Vaught opened Hugo’s, a Mexican restaurant in the Montrose district whose food earned Ortega a James Beard nod last year.

With his first cookbook, “Street Food of Mexico,” Ortega went back to the mercados and street vendors he came to know so well as a child, and also ventured to other favorite cities around the country.

On those trips back to Mexico, he took with him his brother, Ruben, who is the pastry chef at his restaurants, and noted food photographer Penny De Los Santos, who documented the journey.

Philadelphia chef Jose Garces, who runs more than a dozen restaurants across the country and won the second season of “The Next Iron Chef,” releases his second cookbook, “The Latin Road Home,” on Oct. 8. Though born to Ecuadorian parents in Chicago, Garces takes home cooks through five Latin countries, including Mexico, that have influenced his culinary style.

You’ll find recipes for street food and traditional homecooked dishes from each country, but for a true tour of Latin America — from a James Beard Award-winning chef who has a doctorate in history, nonetheless — you have to check out Maricel E. Presilla’s “Gran Cocina Latina” (W. W. Norton & Company, $45).

The Cuban-born Presilla, who owns two restaurants in Hoboken, N.J., has written a number of cookbooks before, but none like “Gran Cocina,” which Oct. 1. Only someone like Presilla could write a book like this. With more than 500 recipes divided into 20 chapters, the book is a culmination of her many years traveling and living abroad, where she studied cultures, cuisines and social and political histories in almost every Spanish- and Portugese-speaking country.

Thicker than a college textbook, but equally as detailed, the book’s 912 pages aim to show as much as tell readers how dishes such as mole or escabeche reflect the marriage of many cultures over time.

“The road from the Latin American kitchen to the North American table is filled with potholes,” she writes. “But my aim is always the same: to adapt and transform the elemental beauty and tastes of Latin American cooking to the modern kitchen while respecting the food’s primary flavors, and to create earthy, intensely flavored dishes that keep you reaching for more.”

You won’t find as many slick food photos as in your typical cookbook, but “Gran Cocina Latina” is anything but average.