Reviewed by: Saberes y sabores en México y el Caribe Joy Landeira De Maeseneer, Rita, and Patrick Collard, eds. Saberes y sabores en México y el Caribe. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. Pp. 356. ISBN 978-90-420-3044-2. Rita De Maeseneer adopts a new term, “gastrocrítica,” to study the multiple connotations of food in cultural contexts and literary texts. Although food is the essential ingredient, it is the large measure of imagination and in-depth research of the fourteen essayists that makes this collection about the “saberes y sabores” of Mexico and the Caribbean so satisfying. Divided into two well-organized sections, each with seven essays and concise abstracts, the volume functions like two books in one, presenting food in both Mexican and Caribbean historical, social, literary, and cultural settings. As if to stave off anticipated accusations that food is an unworthy topic, De Maesenner’s introduction pointedly rejects what she and Jennifer Ruark have termed “scholarship-lite” literature that incorporates recipes to promote a feminist agenda, citing Como agua para chocolate by Laura Esquivel as an example, and eschews the easy use of “gastronomic imagery” in texts destined for mass consumption, stating: “[E]n esta edición hemos procurado no transitar por esta senda light” (10). The self-congratulatory implication that this volume’s gastrocritical approach is more sophisticated than previous “light” fare seems unwarranted. If “food” is at the core of gastrocriticism and a new subgenre is emerging, then all manner of approaches and primary texts should be considered and tolerated. Literary and cultural tastes vary, but a well-conceived critical method can and should yield equally respectable results. [End Page 348] Despite this initial “sour-grapes” attitude, the selection of essays from a 2007 colloquium at the University of Anwerp, Belgium, is indeed appetizing and reflects a mixture of social and literary contributions. Adolfo Castañón opens the section on Mexico by sampling the richness of its cuisine—mole, pozole, tamal, tortilla, and chile relleno—using historic, anthropologic, and literary resources. Industrial advances like milling corn, prefabricating mole, canning tamales, and mass-producing tortillas have fomented not only a kitchen revolution, but a sexual one. Critic An Van Hecke explores how the “woman-in-the-kitchen” image fuels imaginative works by Sandra Cisneros, linking food and magic with women’s power issues. The gastro-erotic relationship between food and sex, comida–cama, or more graphically put comer–coger, in the work of six Mexican writers is researched by Diana Castelleja. Again, the woman’s place and space is central to this dichotomy, since women are expected to satisfy all kinds of appetites and are often blamed for offering forbidden fruits. Even on the spiritual plate, food has an essential function, with Eucharistic bread and wine transubstantiating for Christ’s body and blood. Eugenia Houvenaghel explores Sor Juana Inés’s comparison of this sacred sacrament to an Aztec ritual, using a crónica by Torquemada, Teoqualo (Dios es comido), to unite material and spiritual matters. In his 1940 essay, entitled “Los factores humanos de la cubanidad,” anthropologist and folklorist Fernando Ortiz (1881–1969) famously established the concept of “ajiaco” as the culinary emblem of Cuba in order to describe the island’s racial identities, inseparably connecting food to culture. Following in his footsteps, the saberes y sabores of the Caribbean section blends historic allusions to food with metaphors that define the diversity of this region. The first two essays deliver carefully detailed historical treatises of the cuisines of colonial America. José G. Guerrero’s fifty-two-page monographic essay enumerates specific foodstuffs and traditions that fused to form a cocina criolla that combines Indo-Afro-Hispanic tastes with French-Flemish-English-Portuguese cooking. De Maeseneer’s historical exploration of the culinary aspects of the Década del Nuevo Mundo, a sixteenth-century text by Pedro Martír de Anglería, even confronts the theme of cannibalism and succeeds in adding a controversial flavor to gastrocriticism. Although recipe books do not typically appear in scholarly studies, Efraín Barradas compares El cocinero puertorriqueño (1859) and El manual del cocinero cubano (1856) to illustrate how regional ingredients and preparation methods nurtured the formation of Puerto...