Foodscapes, Foodfields, and Identities in the YucatÁn. Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz
now common knowledge that Yucatecan food typically does not include many milk products; that chili peppers are used to garnish meals, but foods are not cooked spicy hot; that pork and fowl are preferred over beef; that banana leaves are the element of choice to wrap foods before baking them in pit-holes; that Seville orange juice and lime juice are the standard marinating liquids; and that many of the spices and ingredients regularly used come from the Middle East via the Caribbean region. Also, very few Yucatecan recipes make use of tomato sauce to stew meats or vegetables (although fried or roasted tomato sauces can be used to garnish roasted, grilled, or baked meats), nor is sour cream used to cook meals. The combinations of ingredients peculiar to Yucatecan cooking allow regional dishes to be recognized by their aspect, aroma, texture, and distinctive flavors. There is also, in Yucatán, an established rhythm of food consumption, ingrained as part of the regional food culture, that contributes to the naturalization of taste. Yucatecans have adopted a weekly cycle of foods that integrates, repeats, and inscribes the preference for the use of certain ingredients and cooking techniques in local taste. Either domestic cooks or ‘economic kitchens'14 have assumed responsibility for reproducing this cycle of meals, making it almost ‘unnatural' to eat, for example, pork and beans on a day other than Monday, or puchero (stew) on any other day but Sunday. Restaurants often partake in this custom, making some dishes available as ‘specials' on the days of the week that Yucatecans expect to eat them.
However, it is also important to recognize that, whether one looks into the private or the public sphere, it is possible to find two interrelated and recognizable but distinguishable forms of Yucatecan cuisine. In this book I develop a distinction between what I call the culinary and the gastronomic fields. Since the nineteenth century, Yucatecans have appropriated culinary techniques, procedures, ingredients, and recipes originating in Europe and the Grand Caribbean region (encompassing the islands of the Caribbean Sea and its coastal areas, from Louisiana to the shores of Venezuela). Also, in their homes, domestic cooks appropriated and modified recipes from central Mexico and other Mexican regions to match local tastes. This variety of recipes was integrated into early cookbooks and in the domestic cooking of urban families, providing Yucatecans with a sense of cosmopolitanism. Hence, I conceptualize the culinary field as an open, inclusive field where recipes, ingredients, and cooking techniques and technologies from different cultural sources find acceptance, and where individuals find room for self-expression, creativity, and innovation in adapting those dishes to local taste. The analysis of the emergence and development of this field requires attention to processes of cultural exchange and hybridization, to global/local and minor translocal articulations, and to a variety of local understandings of the ‘modern'. The culinary field firmly establishes the Yucatecans' perception of themselves as cosmopolitan, progressive, and open to external influences.
At the time when Yucatecan domestic cooks were inventing the regional culinary field, some commercial cooks were given the opportunity to create and promote new foods, appropriating dishes from the Maya and peasant populations of the region, finding inspiration in recipes from other areas of the world, blending and adapting them to the locally available ingredients and to the taste of the region's middle and upper classes, and making them unique and specific to Yucatecan culture. Progressively, restaurateurs, with their customers' concurrence, have selected a number of dishes that have been turned into canonic and iconic representatives of Yucatecan cuisine, giving birth to what I conceptualize as the gastronomic field. Hence, in this book, I define the term ‘gastronomic field' as a socio-cultural arena in which individuals have developed explicit rules, norms, recipes, ingredients, techniques, and procedures for cooking (producing), and consuming food. My contention is that the Yucatecan gastronomic field is instituted through textual constructions, as promoted in cookbooks recognized as authoritative on Yucatecan gastronomy, and through the culinary practices performed in restaurants, where menus are seen as exemplary, pedagogical, and paradigmatic representations of Yucatecan gastronomy. Over time, Yucatecans have devised a quasi-formal set of rules that define which ingredients may or may not be allowed into the field, what combinations of ingredients or dishes in a meal are possible, the aesthetics of their presentation, and the etiquette for their consumption.15 These rules have been established through repetition and standardization, both in the content of cookbooks and in the lists of dishes presented in restaurant menus.
As I understand them, the culinary and gastronomic fields are intersecting spheres where individuals and groups engage in the textual and practical production and consumption of food. These fields are found in an immanent relation to each other. While arising from the Yucatecan culinary field, the gastronomic field is one that is restrictive, exclusive, and governed by explicit rules. It is one where writers, cooks, and consumers engage in a process of negotiation and purification whereby some elements are defined as proper or alien to Yucatecan ‘cultural traditions' and, consequently, are included or excluded from recipe collections and restaurant menus. In this context, while operating within the culinary field, agents stress their creativity and inventiveness in appropriating and devising new dishes. For them, their own creativity is based on their knowledge of diverse culinary sources. However, when performing within the gastronomic field, they declare it to be closed to external influences and affirm the exclusivity of its roots in the cultural values of Yucatecan society. It is here that we need to see that the constitution, institution, bifurcation, and relations between these fields are intersected by the post-national and post-colonial constructions of a regional identity that is opposed to central Mexican domination.
The gastronomic field disseminates its effects into the private domain. In the latter, domestic cooks see themselves (at times of heightened localism) as resisting the forces of Mexican or foreign cultural colonization and refuse to change their recipes. They assert a local gastronomic logic, claiming the authority to establish what can or cannot be admitted into—or recognized as belonging to—Yucatecan cuisine. The gastronomic field is found in a paradoxical situation: although it tends to solidify over time, it simultaneously rests upon a social imaginary that places the emphasis on local/regional ingenuity, creativity, and innovation and on the artistic freedom of expression of locally rooted but cosmopolitan cooks.
Cod Biscayne-Style: Between the Yucatecan Culinaryand Gastronomic Fields
With the following account, I seek to illustrate how the culinary and gastronomic fields contribute to the naturalization of taste. While living in San Cristóbal de las Casas in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, we were once invited to stay at a friend's house a few days before the Christmas holiday. For this social gathering, our host announced that she had cooked a dish of cod Biscayne-style. In a paella pan she had fried a mixture of shredded cod with onions, tomato slices, almonds, olives, and spices. It was a flavorful, fried meal, with scant sauce. Cod Biscayne-style is one of the several ‘traditional' dishes that families choose to consume during the Christmas season all over the Mexican territory. In response to this custom, supermarkets import massive amounts of salted Norwegian cod. Although the flavors of my friend's dish were enjoyable, I could not recognize the dish that I grew used to in the state of Yucatán (see figure I.1). In 2000, when I moved back to Yucatán, I watched how friends' families and relatives all fell into a shopping and cooking frenzy during the winter holidays in anticipation of the Christmas Eve celebration. In different families, each member who was proud of his or her cooking abilities strove to contribute his or her best dish to the meal. Thus, for Christmas supper, families' tables could end up with two soups, one or two salads, at least one pasta dish, one or two fruit salads, baked ham, baked turkey, refried black beans, lobster or shrimp—and, of course, cod Biscayne-style. During supper, relatives and friends eased their food down with national or imported red, white, or sparkling wines; after the meal, they were served brandy, vodka, whiskey, or cognac.16
Figure I.1. Cod Biscayne-style, final stages of cooking
Dish elaborated by the author following the recipe of Gloria Vargas y Vargas. Photograph courtesy of G. Vargas Cetina, 2005.
Within my wife's family, one aunt has long been recognized as owning the ‘best' recipe for cod Biscayne-style. After a sustained monopoly (lasting longer than the 25 years that I have been related