Gender, epistemology and cooking: Rethinking Encarnación Pinedo's El cocinero español

Abstract

Gender, Epistemology and Cooking: Rethinking Encarnacion Pinedo's El cocinero espanol Encarnacion Pinedo's 1898 publication of El cocinero Espanol marks an important moment in Chicana/Mexicana history. Re-released in 2003 as Encarnacion's kitchen in an edited edition by Dan Strehl with an introductory essay by Victor Valle, El cocinero Espanol takes on a form that the author did not intend. Strehl edits the 880 recipes down to approximately 200 recipes because many recipes were “redundant.” This essay examines how the 2003 edition is embedded in Chicano nationalist thinking, which has enabled the editors to portray the text as authentically Mexican/Chicano and therefore located outside of feminist, multi-ethnic, and transnational considerations. The 2003 edition thus falls away from the original text and raises a number of the concerns and problems that Chicana feminist methodology is well suited to address. By tracking three thematic/intellectual issues: discourses on cookbooks as displays of skill rather than redundancy; theories of epistemology, conversation, and social knowledge; and nationalist versus postcolonial contexts, the article shows that we must read El cocinero Espanol with a Chicana feminist methodology rather than with the same narrow gender/race essentialist mode that Strehl and Valle use to frame the text.