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Take My Word: Autobiographical Innovations of Ethnic American Working Women

University of California Press

Culinary Art, Literary Art: The Cookbook as Autobiography

Books were rare. My mother had one, which she kept in the cedar box. It had a faded polychrome drawing on the cover with the title La Cocinera Poblana, a cookbook which had belonged to Grandmother Isabel. We did not need it for cooking the simple, never-changing meals of the family. It was the first book from which Doa Henriqueta ever read to me. The idea of making printed words sound like the things you already knew about first came through to me from her reading of the recipes. I thought it remarkable that you could find oregano in a book as well as in the herb pot back of our house .
Ernesto Galarza, Barrio Boy

I still think that one of the pleasantest of all emotions is to know that I, I with my brain and my hands, have nourished my beloved few, that I have concocted a stew or a story, a rarity or a plain dish, to sustain them truly against the hungers of the world .
M. F. K. Fisher, The Gastronomical Me

At first glance, Ernesto Galarza's description of his reading primer and M. F. K. Fisher's recollections of her work as a mother and a wife make

an unlikely literary pairing, discordances yoked together by my own critical violence.1 Yet as personal narratives they speak to one and the same end: food. In twin attempts to keep their readers off balance, words are equated not only with metaphysical intangibles (this would be predictable, in literary texts), but also with the transient and material pleasure of eating: for Galarza, who underscores his working-class status, these foods are "simple""frijoles, chile piqun and panocha" (33); for a clearly more affluent Fisher they include "rarities" as well as "plain dishes."

This chapter, which focuses on cookbooks by Mexicanas, argues that writing about food preparation provides the authors of such titles as The Genuine New Mexico Tasty Recipes (1939) and Historic Cookery (1949) with the literary occasion for writing about ethnic community and personal identity as well.2 Before developing this thesis, however, I would like to make a critical detour through Fisher's culinary autobiography. Canonical reading for food professionals and the pice de rsistance of culinary narratives, The Gastronomical Me may initially strike readers as less than revolutionary. Yet the paragraph cited above levels the hierarchy of labor; Fisher represents the writing of literature and the cooking of a dinner as equally satisfying and equally significant forms of work. What is perhaps more important than the equation made between the products of the writer's "brain" and "hands," however, is the pride both forms of work engender in the speaker. Behind the domestic and literary labors foregrounded in this personal narrative, another form of work is operating: that process of self-reflection whose end product is articulation of the self. Reappraise this apparently unassuming paragraph on cooking and creativity with an eye on the "I," and you will find that, far from being restrained, it is insistently present.

The very title of Fisher's autobiographical foray insists that to write about food is to write about the self as well. In these wartime reminiscences "the hungers of the world" provide a compelling metaphor for love and desire; the author writes of her own wants and those of the numerous people she encounters on her travels over two continents. Fisher describes with equal relish her consumption of caviar and cod, boeuf bourguignon and frijoles, and these culinary equations provide her with a means of asserting the existence of the less palpable hungers we all share. Erasing differences of class and culture along with distinctions between writing and cooking. Fisher implies that in producing a discrete "I" she is

in fact representing, at least to a certain extent, "us" and "them" as well.

What appeared during the Second World War as a humanistic effort to resist the divisive polemics of fascism and Nazism becomes in the postmodern frame of reference itself a (cultural) imperialism: if the well-meaning Anglo-American appreciates the products of different peoples' culinary labor, she nevertheless consumes them and, in so doing, makes them a part of herself. If I have not persuaded you that the edible metaphor may in fact accord with the seriousness of the occasion, let me rephrase this formulation more conventionally. By writing about the food and, by implication, the cultures of people distinct from herself in an acquisitive wayas desirable to sample because they are "exotic"Fisher represents such "foreign" traditions as commodities to be (literally) assimilated for her own use.

The compiler of cookbooks as artist? Perhaps. But as political critic? We do not often rank cookbooks as literature, let alone as the occasion, whether covert or explicit, for political commentary. We may be readier to grant the connections between cooking and creative expression in a more diffuse sense, interpreting the gendered labor of the kitchen as feminine artistry. "She could paint with one hand / Studying grapes and peaches / A bowl of pears she would later / Cut, peel and stew for dinner," Joan Aleshire begins her "Exhibition of Women Artists (17901900)," affirming both the homely labor involved in feeding "the colicky child" and the heroic work of transforming this domestic practice into the subject of art.3

Students of American folk art have for some time been insisting that we acknowledge the previous centuries' "song fests . . . sewing, and sharing [of] favorite recipes" not merely as testaments to the exigencies of women's lives but as creative expressions in their own right. The editors of Artists in Aprons argue that because such domestic art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not explicitly contravene dominant social values but, rather, appeared to conform to the prescribed domestic role of women, its producers could often work relatively freely, undeterred by many of the obstacles set in the paths of professional women artists.4 Writers on women's culinary texts agree. Alan Grubb's assessment of late-nineteenth-century Southern cookbooks as having generally been "published locally and in limited editions" suggests that modesty of scale may be, at least in part, what allows women to use this genre as a literary entre.5 His acknowledgment that the authors' prefaces reveal "the life stories of

these women and those for whom they wrote" calls attention to the way in which collective affirmation can open into personal narrative, while his description of Jessie C. Benedict's The Blue Ribbon Cook Book (1904) as autobiographical as well as culinary"We learn, somewhat surprisingly (in that her book is otherwise simply a recipe book), how her own experience as a homemaker laid the basis of her subsequent 'career'"anticipates the hybrid texts home economist Fabiola Cabeza de Baca was to write in New Mexico some four decades later.6 Tey Diana Rebolledo's distinction between storytelling and story writing is also useful here: "It was acceptable for...