Tag Archives: Spanish Cooking

Arte de cocina_edited-1

Using Cookbooks in Historical Archaeological Research: New Mexico as a Case Study

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Arte de cocina_edited-1

Using cookbooks as a tool in historical archaeological research might sound a tad bit absurd, but by examining certain characteristics of these books, it becomes possible to see dirt-covered artifacts in a slightly different light.

As a tribute to my childhood friend, Meli-Duran Kirkpatrick, and at the request of her husband, archaeologist Dr. David Kirkpatrick, I wrote an article

DAILY LIFE THROUGH COOKING AND COOKBOOKS: A BRIEF GUIDE TO USING COOKBOOKS AS A TOOL IN HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY

about the feasibility and possibility of using cookbooks in interpreting the archaeological record found in historical sites in the Southwest, chiefly New Mexico. Of course, the methodology could be extrapolated to other circumstances and other regions.

To read the article, please click on Published article in The Artifact for the .pdf; please be aware that it’s a pretty large file! Note that it takes about a minute or more for it to load. And you need to scroll down a few pages to get to the actual article.

The article, which appeared in The Artifact (Vol. 49, 2011), is reprinted with the permission of the El Paso Archaeological Society, El Paso, Texas.

The following excerpt explains my thoughts on the validity of the material discussed in the article.

WHY USE COOKBOOKS IN HISTORICAL RESEARCH?

Cookbooks make concrete what is basically oral culture. In many areas of the world and in many periods of history as well, cookbooks are as scarce as hens’ teeth. When people, mostly men, wrote down bits and pieces about food, something compelled them to do so. Whatever their motives, such material provides historians and historical archaeologists with another tool useful in the search for the often nebulous past.

Put into the context of the time period under scrutiny, researchers can read cookbooks in many different ways. In examining period cookbooks, either printed or in unpublished manuscript form, evidence often exists to illuminate many ofthe following points:

  • Family size
  • Societal changes
  • Literacy and mathematical skills
  • Technological changes
  • Gender roles and accepted behavior
  • Ingredients available locally
  • Ingredients acquired through trade
  • Cooking equipment
  • Meal patterns and other food-related behavior
  • Upper class values, or status markers
  • Middle-class and lower-class imitations of upper classes
  • Traditions

Scholars like Barbara K. Wheaton began realizing the importance of cookbooks in the interpretation of daily life in early France. When Wheaton produced Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789 in 1983, she found encouragement in the work of historians such as Fernand Braudel in Annales: Economics, Societés, Civilizations ) Since then, a wealth of scholarship indicates that food studies, including studies of cookbooks, now ranks closely to other respected academic disciplines like chemistry, engineering,  history,  and anthropology  and archaeology.

Like Wheaton, archaeologist Elizabeth M. Scott looked at cookbooks from a Eurocentric culture, in this case British. She focused on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglo­-American cookbooks in her article ” ‘A Little Gravy in the Dish and Onions in a Tea Cup’: What Cookbooks Reveal about Material Culture.” She concluded that, for archaeologists, “… since functional typologies have been called into question for Anglo­-American households, we should be even more cautious when assigning function to artifacts from households of other ethnic and racial groups. It is clear that established methodologies, interpretation of vessel use, status studies, and analyses of gendered labor roles all need thoughtful, critical reconsideration.”

….

© 2012 C. Bertelsen

Spanish Cooks and The Essence of Their Art

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“Just like in the movies, when the hero finally gets up to the ticket window and the clerk slams it shut.” That’s the thought that ballooned in my mind when I walked up to the doors of the Museo del Prado in Madrid on a Monday morning.

CLOSED.

No Velazquez.

Of course, Monday. Here’s something mnemonic for travelers:  Monday = no museums.

Even though I really wanted to throw a hissy fit worthy of Scarlet O’Hara, I did what I always do when disappointed by something in life:  I looked for something to cook or to eat. Since cooking was out of the question at the moment, eating seemed like a good thing to consider.

Across the street, I saw a large hand-lettered sign, like the sandwich boards in front of American diners. 

TAPAS.

I darted through the traffic like a ball in an old pinball machine and pushed open the door of the place.

As I sat down at the long bar, I couldn’t believe all the different dishes I was seeing. I glanced at the clock — only 10 a.m. And yet people jammed the joint, pointing to this dish and that, swilling glasses of red wine and smoking incessantly. What was that old saying, “When in Rome … ?”

So I found art that day anyway.  I gorged on some of the very same dishes that Velazquez included in his art.

Served in clay cazuelas, that food inspired artists like Velazquez to paint. And cooks/chefs like Francisco Martínez Montiño and Diego Granado Maldonado to, well, cook.

Francisco Martínez Montiño — chef to Philip III — named his book Arte de cocina, pastelería, vizcochería y conservería (1611).

And his rival, Diego Granado Maldonado, named his Libro del Arte de Cozina (1599).

Martínez Montiño’s book went through 22 editions before 1760. In that book, in a way common to some people even today, he passive-aggressively nails Granado Maldonado, out of jealousy aiming to destroy the other’s reputation. (For just one modern example, see Madeline & Julia.) According to Alicia Rios, Martínez Montiño wrote the following:

The intent I have in writing this little book is that there are no books which can assist those who serve the Office of the Kitchen, and that they cannot commit all of it to memory. Only one I have seen, and so mistaken, that it is enough to ruin whoever uses it, and composed by an Official who is almost unknown in this Court; and in this way the things of the Book are not practiced in a way that any Apprentice can benefit from, least of all the Spanish. (From Culinary Biographies, p. 272.)

Like Ibn Sayyār al-Warrāq in his tenth-century Baghdadi cookbook, Martínez Montiño begins his work with an admonition on the importance of cleanliness in the kitchen:

CAPITULO PRIMERO*

De la limpieza de la cocina,

y del gobierno que ha de tener el Cocinero mayor en ella.

…

Otra cosa tengo experimentada, que hombre que sea torpe, o patituerto, nunca salen oficiales, ni son bien limpios. Procurese que sean de buena disposición, liberales, de buen rostro, y que presuman de galanes, que con ello andarán limpios, y lo serán en su oficio, que los otros, por ser pesados, tienen pereza, y nunca hacen cosa buena, que el oficio de la Cocina, aunque parece que es cosa facil, no es sino muy dificultuoso.

Funny, isn’t it, how nothing really changes?

*

Chapter One

Of cleanliness in the Kitchen
And the discipline that the head Cook needs there.

Another thing I’ve experienced, that clumsy men, bandy-legged, never are they skilled nor very clean. Look for those with a good disposition, free spirits, handsome features, and who think like winners, with all that they will be clean in their persons and will also be clean in their work, but the others, being sluggish and lazy, never will produce anything good, thinking that the job of a Cook is an easy thing, when it is nothing but difficult. (Translation by C. Bertelsen)

© 2010 C. Bertelsen