Recipes for a Different Modernity

As a newly married couple, one of the first quarrels my husband and I had was about cooking. Interested in finding a recipe for pizza crust, I suggested we look through one of the new cookbooks we received as a wedding gift. My husband, on the other hand, insisted it would be more efficient and sensible to Google “the best pizza crust ever.” For my husband, why would we settle for anything less than a five-star recipe supported by thousands of reviews? There was no contest between a recipe vetted by scores of objective cooking enthusiasts and one woman’s family tradition. But from my perspective, our cookbooks represented an alternative source of wisdom and authority that the internet could never rival, a living tradition of cooking that had been passed down through generations and would become part of our family for years to come.

This argument came back to mind as I began reading Denise Chávez’s A Taco Testimony (2006). After a long career in fiction, Chávez’s wrote her first and only memoir, focusing on her family history and, unsurprisingly, their culinary customs. Calling it a collection of “Meditations on Family, Food, and Culture,” Chávez tells the story of her upbringing in a seemingly well-off Mexican-American family in New Mexico. She sheds light on the economic and relational hardships that went on behind the scenes and offers her new perspectives as an adult looking back on her childhood.  

A Taco Testimony is a visually engaging and interactive text, and one of its most unique features are the included recipes, which are found scattered throughout, interrupting the narrative at any moment to provide a long (or short) ingredient list and cooking instructions. What makes these recipes stand out, besides the fact that this text is marketed as a memoir and not a cookbook, is the language used to describe the ingredients and cooking instructions. Unlike the conventional recipe genre—which uses chronological, step-by-by step instructions and precise, quantitative measurements—Chávez’s family recipes are long-winded, filled with seemingly superfluous anecdotal details and personal opinions.

In almost every recipe, Chávez provides arbitrary ingredient amounts couched in phrases such as, “or any other kinds [that] you have on hand,” “depends on what you have,” “what you’re feeling like that day,” or “any kind and any shape that you have.” Rather than providing exact measurements or clear-cut instructions, she creates these recipes like narratives, choosing to highlight the subjectivity of the cook and the memory of her mother’s dishes instead of sharing precise information.

The subjective nature of the recipes also extends to the step-by-step cooking directions. For example, she includes a recipe for “Peanut Butter and Banana Sandwiches,” which of course lists just a handful of ingredients: “1 or more loaves of soft, white bread. Forget whole wheat, kids don’t like it. Creamy peanut butter. Bananas as needed. Toothpicks.” Something as simple as a sandwich should not necessarily require a page-long recipe, but Chávez is not concerned with the conventional recipe genre. Shifting to the cooking instructions, she writes: 

Take a loaf of soft, white bread and cut off the bones.
Save the bones in a plastic bag for capirotada or meat loaf.
Spread creamy peanut butter on two slices of bread.
Cut bananas into small rounds, not too thick.
Put a colorful toothpick into each triangle.
Warn kids about the toothpicks.
Pass out sandwiches.
Warn kids and whatever adults are nearby about the toothpicks again.
Pick up toothpicks and monitor miniature “sword fights” between the boys.
Hand out washrags to everyone.
Pick up washrags.
Get ready for the piñata!!!   

As is evident, the cooking instructions (if one can really call them instructions), end by the fifth line. From that point on, Chávez is not providing objective steps to craft the perfect peanut-butter and banana sandwiches. Instead, she is reliving a family memory in which childhood birthday parties were filled with these toothpick sandwiches, kids horsing around with their food, and a celebratory piñata finale. Indeed, many of the food preparation steps she does provide are subjective and based on Chávez’s own experiences, highlighting how recipes are embedded in a larger community culture.

Eliza Smith The Compleat Housewife

Although Chávez’s recipes might read as simply humorous or parodic, in many ways her approach to cooking represents a return to the recipe genre conventions of the medieval and pre-modern eras. As Henry Notaker explains in A History of Cookbooks (2017), it was not until the eighteenth century that “more and more authors defined cooking as a branch of science or a form of chemistry.” Examples of this scientific transition in Europe include Swedish housekeeper Casja Warg, who wrote in the preface to her cookbook “the science, how things ought to be measured, divided, and mixed, and to obtain this I have given weight, measure, and time for the preparations.” In Britain, William Kitchiner was an early adopter of this empirical attitude and took great pains to be precise, explaining in detail how these exact measures might be achieved: “The measure, the liquid graduated measure of the apothecaries, as it appeared more accurate and convenient than any other: the pint being divided into sixteen ounces, the ounce into eight drachms; a middling-sized teaspoon will contain about a drachm.” Clearly, this objective, impersonal method of recording recipes reflects the development of empiricism in the natural sciences during the Enlightenment. 

In contrast to these modern conventions, medieval and pre-modern recipes have their roots in oral tradition. As Isabel De la Cruz Cabanillas, a historian of early-modern women’s recipes, writes, medieval recipes were often addressed to a particular audience—such as a daughter or pupil—rather than an impersonal, unknown readership. The directions and quantification of ingredients is not so precise, and there is more room for interpretation. As both De la Cruz Cabanillas and Notaker explain, the transfer from oral to written modes was not an effort to be more precise. Rather, it was intended as a memory aide, so women, already familiar with their mother’s soup or pudding recipe, could easily bring that dish into their home and modify or interpret the directions according to their own family’s needs or desires. Thus, in its transition from medieval to modern, the recipe is no longer a recorded experience to be shared with a newly wedded daughter or friend in need of a draught against gout. Instead, the recipe becomes a didactic genre to teach an unknown audience of novice cooks—detached from a particular family tradition—in the most universal and precise manner possible.

Alongside its evolution as a more scientific genre, the modern recipe also becomes more secular. While God played an important role in medieval recipes, with phrases like “it will help you, if God please” or “it will help, if God will,” as the recipe genre enters modernity, these concluding phrases gradually vanish. In the middle ages, precision and accuracy are no match for God’s enduring will. Although mentions of a recipe’s virtue might still be found in early modern medicinal recipes, such as “it is an excellent remedy for” or “an improved remedy against,” it is clear that “the healing power of the divinity” slowly fades as modernity sets in. Indeed, the easily accessible “hive mind” of the internet has brought forth a new approach to universality and objectivity in daily cooking practices—akin to those adopted through the early modern period. Today, one can acquire a universally approved recipe for just about anything, rated five stars by thousands of anonymous and seemingly impartial reviewers. With this level of empirical feedback at one’s fingertips, the search for the objective “best” becomes privileged over the familiar or the tried and true.

In the end, my husband relented, and we made the pizza crust from our cookbook, The Minimalist Kitchen. Since then, we’ve acquired other volumes such as Dinner for Two and a collection of family recipes bound together by my sister-in-law. Although these recipes have not been vetted by thousands of internet users and often are missing a step or two from Grandma or Great Aunt Sherma, using these recipes privileges cultural memory and tradition over efficiency and precision. Thus, we participate in the ritual of cooking not as a means of scientific inquiry or perfection, but to strengthen the community ties that bring us together at the table.

Alexandrea is a doctoral candidate studying twenty-first century U.S. Latina/o literature in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work has been featured in publications such as Latinx Talk and Pterodáctilo and is forthcoming in the journal Aztlán.