Estefan Kitchen

By NANCY ANCRUM
nancrum@MiamiHerald.com

One cookbook mines tradition with business savvy and a longing for abuela's Cuban kitchen. The other uses tradition as a springboard to dive into the flavors of multiple cultures.

Both books, published this week, look to Latin cuisine for a foundation, and both are written by stars at the top of their professions. And, Estefan Kitchen and Cuisine à Latina both have Miami home girls at the helm.

From there, they diverge. The difference can be wrapped up in a single ham croquette: Singer Gloria Estefan and her music-producer husband, Emilio, present the comfortingly familiar: ground, smoked ham coated in cracker meal. Chef Michelle Bernstein enriches her croquetas with creamy Gorgonzola cheese and Serrano ham.

Estefan Kitchen (Celebra, $27.50) sticks to the basics, making the most of the Cuban staples that have made big hits out of their restaurants in South Florida and Orlando.

''At Bongos and Larios, we cook for a lot of people,'' Emilio Estefan said in an interview. ``At the same time, we use a lot of recipes that we use in our house -- Gloria's grandma's food, my grandma's food. We combined the restaurant side with our kitchen at home.''

Estefan Kitchen has the feel of a family kitchen, a warm and welcoming place where belly-filling comfort food rules. It's a greatest-hits collection of more than 70 recipes, from plantain chips to papas rellenas (picadillo-stuffed mashed-potato balls), arroz con pollo to Cuban sandwiches, watermelon mojitos to guava flan, illustrated with beautiful color photos. (One user-unfriendly detail: There's no index.)

The book is part scrapbook -- indeed, family snapshots with the ragged edges of 1960s Kodak prints and ''affixed'' to the page with scrapbook corners. And it's part walk down memory lane.

''When I was a kid growing up in Cuba, my entire family came over for dinner on Sundays,'' writes Emilio Estefan, 55. 'We gathered around the large kitchen table at my parents' house in Santiago, and my mother would serve us the most delicious arroz con pollo in the world.''

The cookbook is also a business tool, Estefan says.

'In the restaurants, we get calls every single week for the recipes. `How do you make the flan? How do you make the masitas de puerco [fried pork chunks]?' Gloria said a cookbook would be a great thing, a great promotion for the restaurants -- and a little flavor of Cuba.''

A cookbook won't hurt the entertainment side of their business either, says Chadwick Boyd, an Atlanta food and lifestyle brand consultant who has worked with celebrity authors including Tyler Florence.

'People who buy their cookbooks are getting a further inside look into celebrities' lives,'' Boyd says. ``You get to peek in their kitchens, and people love that.''

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