Customer Reviews

Encarnación's Kitchen: Mexican Recipes from Nineteenth-Century California, Selections from Encarnación Pinedo's El cocinero español (California's Studies in Food and Culture)

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Until recent history, women rarely wrote their own stories for the history books, men did. This is especially true of the Hispanic women living in the lands after the Mexican war (1848). The Hispanics living in California and other territories that became the American Southwest were quickly defrauded of their land and civil rights. This cookbook begins with beautifully researched and sensitively written essays describing the social-political context within which Encarnacion penned her recipes. The recipes are as she wrote them in 1898. To cook them accurately presumes adequate knowledge of cooking. Cookbooks are more than a collection of recipes, they transmit culture. This book is necessary for any person deeply interested in the cultural context of California and Southwest cuisine. Before I read this book, I wondered how accurate or true to my experience it would be. My late grandmother, Catalina Maria Ortiz Acosta, was a woman from a prominent Hispanic family, and was born in Los Angeles in 1904. When I read this book I recognized the recipes from the meals and the style of food my grandmother had cooked. The history confirmed the stories she would tell me about the various political elite she knew. (Catalina Pico, the grand daughter of Pio Pico, the last Mexican Governor or Alta California was her godmother.) I highly recommend this book.