Cooking Technology

Transformations in Culinary Practice in Mexico and Latin America

Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781474294256
• eBook ISBN:
  9781474234696
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History

New scientific discoveries, technologies and techniques often find their way into the space and equipment of domestic and professional kitchens. Using approaches based on anthropology, archaeology and history, Cooking Technology reveals the impact these and the associated broader socio-cultural, political and economic changes have on everyday culinary practices, explaining why people transform – or, indeed, refuse to change – their kitchens and food habits.

Focusing on Mexico and Latin America, the authors look at poor, rural households as well as the kitchens of the well-to-do and professional chefs. Topics range from state subsidies for traditional ingredients, to the promotion of fusion foods, and the meaning of kitchens and cooking in different localities, as a result of people taking their cooking technologies and ingredients with them to recreate their kitchens abroad. What emerges is an image of Latin American kitchens as places where 'traditional' and 'modern' culinary values are constantly being renegotiated.

The thirteen chapters feature case studies of areas in Mexico, the American-Mexican border, Cuba, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, and Brazil. With contributions from an international range of leading experts, Cooking Technology fills an important gap in the literature and provides an excellent introduction to the topic for students and researchers working in food studies, anthropology, history, and Latin American studies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction—The meanings of cooking and the kitchen: Negotiating techniques and technologies
• PART ONE Refiguring the past, rethinking the present
• 1 Grinding and cooking: An approach to Mayan culinary technology
• 2 Technology and culinary affectivity among the Ch’orti’ Maya of Eastern Guatemala
• 3 From bitter root to flat bread: Technology, food, and culinary transformations of cassava in the Venezuelan Amazon
• 4 Technologies and techniques in rural Oaxaca’s Zapotec kitchens
• PART TWO Transnational and translocal meanings
• 5 The Americanization of Mexican food and change in cooking techniques, technologies, and knowledge
• 6 Home kitchens: Techniques, technologies, and the transformation of culinary affectivity in Yucatán
• 7 If you don’t use chilies from Oaxaca, is it still mole negro? Shifts in traditional practices, techniques, and ingredients among Oaxacan migrants’ cuisine
• 8 Changing cooking styles and challenging cooks in Brazilian kitchens
• 9 Global dimensions of domestic practices: Kitchen technologies in Cuba
• PART THREE Recreating tradition and newness
• 10 Recipes for crossing boundaries: Peruvian fusion
• 11 Forms of Colombian cuisine: Interpretation of traditional culinary knowledge in three cultural settings
• 12 Cooking techniques as markers of identity and authenticity in Costa Rica’s Afro-Caribbean foodways
• Afterword
• Notes on contributors
• Index
• Copyright