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Abstract
This article studies the ways in which the idea of ‘authenticity’ is built and shaped through cultural discourse in Mexican food. The article engages with the intellectual origins of the concept of ‘authenticity’ and the ideologies it carries, in order to study the ways in which it operates in relation to Mexican food. To achieve this, the article focuses on two foreign cooks who have contributed to the naturalization of ‘authenticity’ as a value in Mexican food, both in Mexico and the United States: Diana Kennedy and Rick Bayless. Through an analysis of their cookbooks, self-fashioning and food ideologies, the article contends that ‘authenticity’ is a problematic cultural construct that highlights the diversity of Mexican cuisine but also disparages Mexican-American communities.
Notes
1 Gustavo Arellano, ‘Jonathan Gold Lectures at Marche Moderne about Mexican Food “Authenticity”, Laughs at Rick Bayless’, OC Weekly, 29 August 2010; available at <https://ocweekly.com/jonathan-gold-lectures-at-marche-moderne-about-mexican-food-authenticity-laughs-at-rick-bayless-6623627/> (accessed 4 June 2019); Gustavo Arellano, Taco USA. How Mexican Food Conquered America (New York: Scribner, 2013); Gustavo Arellano, ‘The Problem Isn’t Rick Bayless Cooking Mexican Food—It’s That He’s a Thin-Skinned Diva’, OC Weekly, 28 March 2016; available at <https://ocweekly.com/the-problem-isnt-rick-bayless-cooking-mexican-food-its-that-hes-a-thin-skinned-diva-7075113-2/> (accessed 4 June 2019).
2 Arellano, Taco USA, 89.
3 Arellano, Taco USA, 90.
4 Diana Kennedy, The Cuisines of Mexico (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). Further references to this work will be given in parentheses in the body of the article. See also Craig Clairborne, A Feast Made for Laughter (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1982), 249.
5 Arellano, Taco USA, 98; emphasis in the original.
6 bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992), 37.
7 Lisa Heldke, Exotic Appetities: Ruminations of a Food Adventurer (London: Routledge, 2003), 52 & 168.
8 Heldke, Exotic Appetites, 214.
9 In this regard, see Margath A. Walker, ‘Border: Food and Food on the Border: Meaning and Practice in Mexican Haute Cuisine’, Social and Cultural Geography, 14:6 (2013), 649–67.
10 This concept is one of Bourdieu’s most complex, but I generally follow here the clear definition Bourdieu provides in an oft-cited interview: ‘The habitus, as the word implies, is that which one has acquired, but which has become durably incorporated in the body in the form of permanent dispositions. [ … ] Moreover, by habitus the Scholastics also meant something like a property, a capital’ (Pierre Bourdieu, Sociology in Question, trans. Richard Nice [London: Sage, 1993], 86). For a further discussion of the concept’s different layers, see Karl Maton, ‘Habitus’, in Pierre Bourdieu: Key Concepts, ed. Michael Grenfell (Durham: Acumen, 2012), 48–64.
11 In Mexican-American studies, one could point to Meredith Abarca, a literary critic who has written excellent work on food cultural studies. See, for example, Meredith E. Abarca, Voices in the Kitchen: Views of Food and the World from Working-Class Mexican and Mexican American Women (College Station: Texas A&M U. P., 2006).
12 See Ana Del Sarto, Alicia Ríos & Abril Trigo, The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 2004); Robert McKee Irwin & Mónica Szurmuk, Dictionary of Latin American Cultural Studies (Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 2012); Néstor García Canclini, Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts, trans., with an intro., by George Yúdice (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2001); and George Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture: The Uses of Culture in the Global Era (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 2005).
13 See Ronda L. Brulotte & Alvin Starkman, ‘Caldo De Piedra and Claiming Pre-Hispanic Cuisine As Cultural Heritage’, in Edible Identities: Food As Cultural Heritage, ed. Ronda L. Brulotte & Michael A. Di Giovine (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 109–24; and Clare A. Sammells, ‘Haute Traditional Cuisines. How UNESCO’s List of Intangible Heritage Links the Cosmopolitan to the Local’, in Edible Identities, ed. Brulotte & Di Giovine, 141–58.
14 Arellano, Taco USA; Jeffrey M. Pilcher, Planet Taco. A Global History of Mexican Food (Oxford/New York: Oxford U. P., 2014).
15 José Luis Juárez López, Nacionalismo culinario: la cocina mexicana en el siglo XX (México D. F.: Conaculta, 2008).
16 Jeffrey M. Pilcher, ¡Qué vivan los tamales! Food and the Making of Mexican Identity (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1998).
17 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. P., 1984), 179.
18 Bourdieu, Distinction, trans. Nice, 178.
19 The point de capiton or quilting point is the signifier that totalizes free-floating elements into a field of meaning. In this case, ‘authenticity’ is the signifier that creates a field of meaning of ‘Mexicanness’, which totalizes free-floating elements such as ingredients, practices and the like into a consistent ideology. For a theoretical account of the concept, see Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 87–88.
20 Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 7.
21 Bendix, In Search of Authenticity, 8.
22 Kjell Olsen, ‘Authenticity As a Concept in Tourism Research: The Social Organization of the Experience of Authenticity’, Tourist Studies, 2:2 (2002), 159–82 (p. 176).
23 Olsen, ‘Authenticity As a Concept in Tourism Research’, 178.
24 This discussion can be found in Somogy Varga & Charles Guignon, ‘Authenticity’ (2014), in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, <https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/authenticity/> (last accessed 13 June 2019).
25 Andrew J. Weigert, ‘Self Authenticity As a Master Motive’, in Authenticity in Culture, Self, and Society, ed. Phillip Vannini & J. Patrick Williams (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 37–50.
26 See the discussions in Authenticity, Autonomy and Multiculturalism, ed. Geoffrey Brahm Levey (London/New York: Routledge, 2015).
27 Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski & Frederick Will (Evanston: Northwestern U. P., 1973).
28 Anne Phillips, ‘Against Authenticity’, in Authenticity, Autonomy and Multiculturalism, ed. Levy, 89–103 (p. 92).
29 Arjun Appadurai, ‘On Culinary Authenticity’, Anthropology Today, 2:4 (1986), 25.
30 Appadurai, ‘On Culinary Authenticity’, 25.
31 Félix Guattari, ‘To Have Done with the Massacre of the Body’, in Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972–1977, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, intro. by François Dosse, trans. David L. Sweet, Jarred Becker & Taylor Adkins (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2009), 207–14 (p. 212). My thanks to Iván Eusebio Aguirre Darancou for this reference.
32 For a discussion of the politics of this period, and about the complex roles that indigeneity and peasantry played in national identity and mobilization in the 1970s, see María L. O. Muñoz, Stand Up and Fight: Participatory Indigenismo and Mobilization in Mexico, 1970–1984 (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 2016).
33 Juárez López, Nacionalismo culinario, 216–17.
34 Pilcher, ¡Qué vivan los tamales!, 99–121.
35 Dean McCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken, 1976).
36 For an excellent, concise discussion of the ‘invisibilization’ of Mexican cooks in the context of ethnic restaurateurs, see Krishnendu Ray, The Ethnic Restaurateur (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 92–95.
37 Diana Kennedy, Nothing Fancy: Recipes and Recollections of Soul-Satisfying Food (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2016 [1st ed. 1984]), 17. This book is now the basis of a documentary on Kennedy by Elizabeth Carroll, to be released in 2020.
38 On Gorriti, see Elizabeth Austin, ‘Reading and Writing Juana Manuela Gorriti’s Cocina ecléctica: Modeling Multiplicity in Nineteenth-Century Domestic Narrative’, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, 12 (2008), 31–44.
39 Rebecca Ingram, ‘Popular Tradition and Bourgeois Elegance in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s cocina española’, BHS, XCI:3 (2014), 262–74.
40 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford/New York: Oxford U. P., 1973), 301.
41 Juárez López, Nacionalismo culinario, 219. Salvador Novo, Cocina mexicana o historia gastronómica de la Ciudad de México (México D.F.: Porrúa, 1967).
42 Juárez López, Nacionalismo culinario, 224–25.
43 Kennedy, The Cuisines of Mexico, 34.
44 Diana Kennedy, The Tortilla Book (London/New York: Harper & Row, 1975).
45 Diana Kennedy, Recipes from the Regional Cooks of Mexico (London/New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 1. Further references are to this edition and are given in the main text. See also Kennedy, Mexican Regional Cooking (London/New York: Harper & Row, 1984).
46 Diana Kennedy, The Art of Mexican Cooking: Traditional Mexican Cooking for Aficionados (New York: Clarkson Potter, 2008 [1st ed. 1989]), xii.
47 Diana Kennedy, My Mexico: A Culinary Odyssey with More than 500 Recipes (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2013 [1st ed. New York: Clarkson Potter, 1998]).
48 Diana Kennedy, Oaxaca al gusto: An Infinite Gastronomy (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2010).
49 Diana Kennedy, From My Mexican Kitchen: Techniques and Ingredients (New York: Clarkson Potter, 2003), 9. Further references are given within parentheses in the main text.
50 See Enrique Olvera, Mexico from the Inside Out (London/New York: Phaidon, 2015), 152. Mole madre is Enrique Olvera’s most famous recipe. It consists of a serving of a Oaxacan mole cooked and reconstituted over many days (generally more than 300) accompanied by a mole prepared the same day. Patrons are given tortillas to take the moles from the plate and taste the contrast. This recipe is one of the most compelling examples of the kind of ‘authentic’ dish that the focus on Oaxaca inspires. Rick Bayless devoted the ninth season of his television show to Oaxaca, and the narrative that highlights rural Oaxaca, authentic mezcales and the like clearly echoes Kennedy’s regional narrative from Oaxaca al gusto.
51 Pilcher, Planet Taco, 96–99.
52 Diana Kennedy et al., Cuisine at the Hacienda de los Morales (México D.F.: Landucci, 2001).
53 Laura Emilia Pacheco, ‘El arca de Diana Kennedy’, Letras Libres, 203 (November 2015), 57–62.
54 Anon., ‘Vatel Club México festeja la gastronomía mexicana’, El Universal, 15 February 2017; available at <https://www.eluniversal.com.mx/articulo/menu/2017/02/15/vatel-club-mexico-festeja-la-gastronomia-mexicana> (accessed 11 June 2019).
55 Tejal Rao, ‘Road Tripping with Diana Kennedy’, The New York Times, 21 May 2019 <https://nyti.ms/2Enpum1> (accessed 5 September 2019).
56 Although my comparison between Kennedy and Bayless is based on their divergent notions of authenticity, it should be noted that there is an evident issue of gender here, one that food studies literature frequently raises. As Alice McLean recounts, from the nineteenth century onwards, there are significant distinctions between male gastronomical writing, concerned with the public and with practices of social distinction, and female gastronomical writing, focused on domesticity and the home cook. In my case, this is illustrated in the distinction of Kennedy’s persona—as a learned amateur who develops her knowledge in gendered spaces (such as the home) and with gendered subjects (like the Oaxacan women cooks)—while Bayless operates as the trained chef whose references are public (markets) and who engages more directly with chefs like Olvera and others. Indeed, one could read Kennedy as a particular iteration of the type of food writing developed by women writers in the twentieth century. For a discussion of this question of gender in the English-language world of food writing, see Alice L. McLean, Aesthetic Pleasure in Twentieth-Century Women’s Food Writing: The Innovative Appetites of M. F. K. Fisher, Alice B. Toklas and Elizabeth David (New York/London: Routledge, 2012).
57 One should indeed note the role that PBS has had in developing this idea of authenticity, promoting Pati Jinich and Bayless for Mexico, as well as cooks like Jacques Pépin or Lydia Bastianich. My thanks to Olivia Cosentino for raising this point.
58 Rick Bayless & Deann Groen Bayless, Authentic Mexican: Regional Cooking from the Heart of Mexico (New York: William Morrow & Co., 2007 [1st ed. London: Headline, 1987]), 31. Further references will be given in the body of the article.
59 Charles Allen Baker Clark, Profiles from the Kitchen: What Great Cooks Have Taught Us About Ourselves and Our Food (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2006), 156–57.
60 Jeffrey M. Pilcher, ‘The Embodied Imagination in Recent Writings on Food History’, American Historical Review, 121:3 (2016), 861–87. For an account of the discipline of linguistic anthropology in these terms, see Laura Ahearn, Living Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology (Chichester/Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017).
61 Josée Johnston & Shyon Baumann. Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Landscape (London: Routledge, 2010), 10–11.
62 Sam Binkley, quoted in Johnston & Baumann, Foodies, 11.
63 Johnston & Baumann, Foodies, 12–13.
64 Rick Bayless & JeanMarie Brownson, Rick Bayless’s Mexican Kitchen: Capturing the Vibrant Flavors of a World-Class Cuisine (New York: Scribner, 1996), 14. Further references are to this edition and are given in the body of the article.
65 Julie L. Locher, ‘Cuisine and Globalization: Homogeneity, Heterogeneity and Beyond’, in Globalization. Critical Concepts in Sociology, ed. Roland Robertson & Kathleen E. White, 6 vols (London: Routledge, 2003), VI, Specialized Applications and Resistance to Globalization, 243–60 (pp. 248–49).
66 Rick Bayless & Deann Groen Bayless, More Mexican Everyday (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2015), 194–219. Since the Topolobampo menu rotates, the website cannot be cited accurately.
67 Rick Bayless & Deann Groen Bayless, Mexican Everyday (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2005).
68 Rick Bayless & Deann Groen Bayless, Frontera: Margaritas, Guacamoles and Snacks (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2012), xvi. Further references are to this edition.
69 Rick Bayless & JeanMarie Brownson, Mexico: One Plate at a Time (New York: Scribner, 2000), ix.
70 Rick Bayless & JeanMarie Brownson, Salsas That Cook: Using Classic Salsas to Enliven our Favorite Dishes (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 29–37.
71 Rick Bayless & Deann Groen Bayless, Fiesta at Rick’s: Fabulous Food for Great Times with Friends (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010), 14–15.
72 Anna H. Blessing, Locally Grown: Portraits of Artisanal Farms from America’s Heartland (Chicago: Midway Books, 2012), 245–55.
73 Rick Bayless & Lanie Bayless, Rick & Lanie’s Excellent Kitchen Adventures: Chef-Dad Teenage Daughter Recipes and Stories (New York: Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 2004).
74 Here, I would point to the excellent work of Meredith Abarca, who has been challenging this idea of authenticity in order to recognize the originality of foods made by migrants. See Meredith Abarca, ‘Authentic or Not, It’s Original’, Foods and Foodways, 12 (2004), 1–25 See also Marie Sarita Gaytán, ‘From Sombreros to Sincronizadas: Authenticity, Ethnicity, and the Mexican Restaurant Industry’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 37:3 (2008), 314–41. The latter is a thoughtful work on the way in which performances of authenticity in the Mexican restaurant industry work in the politics of everyday life of Mexican and Chicano communities.
* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.