Season to Taste: Autobiographical Idiosyncrasy in Culinary Narrative

Perhaps El Hoyo, its inhabitants, and its essence can best be explained by telling you a little bit about a dish called capiro-

tada. Its origin is uncertain. But it is made of old, new. stale, and hard bread. It is sprinkled with water and then it is cooked with raisins, olives, onions, tomatoes, peanuts, cheese, and general leftovers of that which is good and bad. It is seasoned with salt, sugar, pepper, and sometimes chili or tomato sauce. It is fired with tequila or sherry wine. It is served hot, cold, or just "on the weather" as they say in El Hoyo. The Garcías like it one way, the Quevedos another. While in general appearance it does not differ much from one home to another it tastes different everywhere. Nevertheless it is still capirotada. And so it is with El Hoyo's chicanos. While many seem to the undiscerning eye to be alike it is only because collectively they are referred to as chicanos. But like capirotada, fixed in a thousand ways and served on a thousand tables, which can only be evaluated by individual taste, the chicanos must be so distinguished .
Mario Suarez, "El Hoyo"

In this analysis of The Good Life I have suggested that a cookbook can reproduce the means to more than material nourishment, that it may reproduce as well those cultural practices and values that provide a community with a means of self-definition and survival. I would argue in addition that essays like "New Mexican Diets" and books like The Good Life may produce not only a communal subject but an individual authority as well. Granted, in "New Mexican Diets" the advancement of the first person is oblique, requiring an interpolation of the "I" in place of the apparently more generic "extension worker" Cabeza de Baca uses to signify herself throughout this piece. Nonetheless, she takes advantage of the language of ethnography to mark a distinctly autobiographical presence, as can be seen by the series of personal achievements celebrated in the narrative—the author's resumé, if you will, in coded form. Not only are both pamphlets listed here ("A canning bulletin in Spanish was published in 1930 and one on 'Food and Its Preparation' in 1932"), they are acclaimed as second only to liturgical texts for rural women: "Next to her prayer books, the rural Spanish-speaking woman treasures these two booklets " (668). Nor are Cabeza de Baca's practical applications any less influential. Her recommendations on canning, for instance, have been widely accepted: "Within five years, half the farm families owned pressure cookers, and many also had tin-can sealers. More varieties of vegetables were being raised. " A decade later, "Nearly every farm family owns or has access to a pressure cooker" (668).

Autobiographical authority in The Good Life is at once more explicit and, because it is more exposed, delineated in more measured tones. The subtitle insists that recipes speak a cultural history, yet the preface establishes an individual record of activities on behalf of this collective. Despite the titular focus on "New Mexico Traditions," the preface begins, not by evoking the cultural or physical geography of the state, but instead by providing us with a page-long introduction to the writer herself, naming the father and grandfather who raised her, the ranch where she grew up, and the schools she attended in the United States and abroad, as well as describing her work as a home economist and a schoolteacher; in short, invoking the people, places, and adult activities that form the basis of her autobiography, We Fed Them Cactus . Thus two languages drive the narrative. If the text grounds its authority in its capacity to provide readers with an "example" of the good life as lived by Hispanos in midcentury, it simultaneously offers a representation of a particular life as lived by Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, writer, teacher, and home economist. This conflation of ethnographic and autobiographic discourse, of the exemplary and the idiosyncratic, is marked throughout the preface, which moves constantly between descriptions of "our Spanish forebears" and references to the subject who in speaking of them associates herself with nuevomexicano traditions. The first two sentences, for example, negotiate between an ethnographic subject and an autobiographical speaker in order to define a life lived contextually: "The recipes which are a part of The Good Life and the family traditions from which the recipes have developed have been a part of my life. They have been a part of the lives of Hispanic New Mexicans since the Spanish colonization of New Mexico" (v). The equation of community traditions with personal development established here is reinforced in the sentences that follow, where a distinctly autobiographical recounting of birthplace and upbringing is itself made representative of "the good life "(v). Toward the close of the preface, readers are again reminded that the structure of this cookbook is contingent upon the personal when Cabeza de Baca insists that the recipes she has selected are themselves derived from the foods "I knew as a child in my grandmother's home"(vi).

Since the play of discourses often operates at the level of the sentence, deciding whether to privilege the language of ethnography or that of autobiography as the ultimate narrative strategy remains at issue. To a certain extent this recounting of the individual life as a representative one is shaped by the demands of audience. Yet while the author literalizes the

two roles of the self (as representative of the cultural record, and as illustrative of singularity) by providing readers with two distinct subjects, she avoids sacrificing a commitment to self-assertion through syntax that refuses to subordinate the singular "I," but that instead positions ethnic practice as contingent upon the personal. The following sentence, for instance, posits a singular "I" situated within a community of which the Turrieta family is paradigmatic: "This simple story of the Turrieta family, the family in The Good Life, revolves around the observance and traditions of what could have been any Hispanic family in a New Mexican village during that period of my work as a home economist" (v-vi). If Cabeza de Baca's assertion of representativeness ("what could have been any Hispanic family") establishes the text as an ethnographic record, she links, curiously enough, her own life to the larger frame of reference within which the Turrieta family is located. Time is measured not by the sweep of armies across the desert or the dictates of politicians but by the discrete labor of the self: "that period of my work as a home economist."

A similar relationship between the personal and the collective is established in the closing sentences of the preface: ' The fondest memories of my life are associated with the people among whom I have worked. The ways of life expressed in the book and the recipes which are a part of those lives have helped make for me The Good Life " (vi) . Here the subject is interpolated through work; more specifically, through that literary labor which mediates between two cultures. Yet the unexpected intrusion of the speaking subject—" for me "—where we might have expected to read without this formulation demands that we read the text not only as a cultural record but as a self-reflexive narrative as well.

Like Margaret Abreu's 1940 article "In the New Mexico Kitchen," where a recipe for menudo begins as cultural representation and closes by affirming autobiographical presence,^[44] culinary narratives like Cabeza de Baca's "New Mexican Diets" and The Good Life confound the line traditionally drawn between autobiography proper, where the subject is presumed to constitute herself as unique, and ethnography, whose post-colonial origin has situated the subject as representative of a culture, typically a culture of "dying breeds." In so doing, these works insist on the cultural practices which in part construct the self without privileging those qualities of the subject that are considered representative and without glossing over articulations that are either ambivalent or set in opposition to the "I" as an

ethnic "type." By making ethnicity concrete, by representing it as it is experienced by the individual rather than invoking Culture as an abstraction, such autoethnographic texts discourage cultural appropriation, whether it be within the domain of economics or of criticism. For those literary critics interested in ethnicity theory, the "hybrid" texts of writers such as Cleofas Jaramillo and Fabiola Cabeza de Baca—where the subject is situated in context but is at the same time quite obviously a presence the reader cannot ignore—may discourage that form of critical imperialism (whether explicit or phrased as nostalgia for a golden, primitive past) that is encouraged by some "purer" forms of ethnographic criticism, in which the (cultural) subject under investigation is always romanticized as either an artifact or about to become one.