Nicaraguan Cooking: My Grandmother's Recipes

Nicaraguan Cooking: My Grandmother's Recipes is a collection of traditional Nicaraguan dishes written in English by Trudy Espinoza-Abrams. The book draws on the author's childhood in Granada, Nicaragua, and the time she spent watching and learning in her grandmother's kitchen. According to its own account, it was the first English-language cookbook focused on Nicaraguan food, and at the time of publication it described itself as the only dedicated Nicaraguan cookbook available in any language.

Granada, the city where Espinoza-Abrams grew up, sits on the northwestern shore of Lake Nicaragua, one of the largest lakes in Central America. The recipes in the book reflect a home cooking tradition shaped by that region's ingredients and methods. By organizing her grandmother's dishes into a written collection, Espinoza-Abrams preserved recipes that had previously been passed along through family practice rather than printed instructions.

The book works as a practical kitchen guide rather than a cultural survey. Its attention stays on the dishes themselves, with directions drawn from one family's long cooking habits in Granada and set down in a form that can be followed step by step in another kitchen.