Marian Betancourt

The Texas Hill Country Cookbook: A Taste of Provence, by Chef Scott Cohen and Marian Betancourt, Globe Pequot Press, 2007.

“There is no need to cross the Atlantic anymore to enjoy the herb-scented cuisine of Provence. In this appealing book, Scott Cohen brings these intense flavors and his own sophistication to Texas Hill Country cooking.” Jacques Pepin.

Betancourt created and wrote this book with Chef Cohen of San Antonio, Texas, who will soon open a French brasserie in that city. Her latest food book, The New Native American Cuisine: from Ancient Traditions to Modern Tastes, will be published in 2009, also by Globe Pequot Press. Her co-authors are the chefs at the Sheraton Wild Horse Pass Resort & Spa’s Kai restaurant, the only Triple A 5-diamond Native American restaurant in the nation.

These books were a direct result of her travels and she has frequently combined food and travel such as in a story about Nashville’s hot chicken for Chile Pepper magazine. In recent years Marian has written more than two dozen travel articles to a variety of magazines. For American Heritage online magazine she wrote about the American connection in the Azores, tracing your roots in Germany, and the increasing number of St. Patrick’s Day parades in the United States. She wrote a dozen features for Travel Lady Magazine, and also for Luxury Web Magazine. In past years, she also wrote for Travel and Leisure.

Marian has written more than 20 articles for Associated Press Features including profiles of chefs Daniel Boulud, Michael Lomonaco, Jimmy Bradley, and John Doherty. She is a regular contributor to Sante, a restaurant industry magazine and has written about the cuisines of Portugal and Germany, wild shrimp, and the search for the blue-footed chicken. Her many stories for Irish America magazine included a profile of Chef Bobby Flay. For Chocolatier Magazine, she wrote the definitive description of the New York chocolate egg cream (Egg Creams: A Gulp of New York Nostalgia) that was included in Glorious Chocolate: The Chocolatier Cookbook, published by Simon and Schuster in 1989. More recently she contributed essays on the Cuba Libre, Moxie, Snapple, Finnish Pulla, Hearts of Palm and Moldy Cheese for The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink, published by Oxford University Press in 2004.