PART ONE—
DEFINING GENRE: CULINARY AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Chapter One—
"I Yam What I Yam":
Cooking, Culture, and Colonialism in New Mexico

Culinary Art, Literary Art: The Cookbook as Autobiography

Books were rare. My mother had one, which she kept in the cedar box. It had a faded polychrome drawing on the cover with the title La Cocinera Poblana, a cookbook which had belonged to Grandmother Isabel. We did not need it for cooking the simple, never-changing meals of the family. It was the first book from which Doña Henriqueta ever read to me. The idea of making printed words sound like the things you already knew about first came through to me from her reading of the recipes. I thought it remarkable that you could find oregano in a book as well as in the herb pot back of our house .
Ernesto Galarza, Barrio Boy

I still think that one of the pleasantest of all emotions is to know that I, I with my brain and my hands, have nourished my beloved few, that I have concocted a stew or a story, a rarity or a plain dish, to sustain them truly against the hungers of the world .
M. F. K. Fisher, The Gastronomical Me

At first glance, Ernesto Galarza's description of his reading primer and M. F. K. Fisher's recollections of her work as a mother and a wife make

an unlikely literary pairing, discordances yoked together by my own critical violence.^[1] Yet as personal narratives they speak to one and the same end: food. In twin attempts to keep their readers off balance, words are equated not only with metaphysical intangibles (this would be predictable, in literary texts), but also with the transient and material pleasure of eating: for Galarza, who underscores his working-class status, these foods are "simple"—"frijoles, chile piquçn and panocha" (33); for a clearly more affluent Fisher they include "rarities" as well as "plain dishes."

This chapter, which focuses on cookbooks by Mexicanas, argues that writing about food preparation provides the authors of such titles as The Genuine New Mexico Tasty Recipes (1939) and Historic Cookery (1949) with the literary occasion for writing about ethnic community and personal identity as well.^[2] Before developing this thesis, however, I would like to make a critical detour through Fisher's culinary autobiography. Canonical reading for food professionals and the pièce de résistance of culinary narratives, The Gastronomical Me may initially strike readers as less than revolutionary. Yet the paragraph cited above levels the hierarchy of labor; Fisher represents the writing of literature and the cooking of a dinner as equally satisfying and equally significant forms of work. What is perhaps more important than the equation made between the products of the writer's "brain" and "hands," however, is the pride both forms of work engender in the speaker. Behind the domestic and literary labors foregrounded in this personal narrative, another form of work is operating: that process of self-reflection whose end product is articulation of the self. Reappraise this apparently unassuming paragraph on cooking and creativity with an eye on the "I," and you will find that, far from being restrained, it is insistently present.

The very title of Fisher's autobiographical foray insists that to write about food is to write about the self as well. In these wartime reminiscences "the hungers of the world" provide a compelling metaphor for love and desire; the author writes of her own wants and those of the numerous people she encounters on her travels over two continents. Fisher describes with equal relish her consumption of caviar and cod, boeuf bourguignon and frijoles, and these culinary equations provide her with a means of asserting the existence of the less palpable hungers we all share. Erasing differences of class and culture along with distinctions between writing and cooking. Fisher implies that in producing a discrete "I" she is

in fact representing, at least to a certain extent, "us" and "them" as well.

What appeared during the Second World War as a humanistic effort to resist the divisive polemics of fascism and Nazism becomes in the postmodern frame of reference itself a (cultural) imperialism: if the well-meaning Anglo-American appreciates the products of different peoples' culinary labor, she nevertheless consumes them and, in so doing, makes them a part of herself. If I have not persuaded you that the edible metaphor may in fact accord with the seriousness of the occasion, let me rephrase this formulation more conventionally. By writing about the food and, by implication, the cultures of people distinct from herself in an acquisitive way—as desirable to sample because they are "exotic"—Fisher represents such "foreign" traditions as commodities to be (literally) assimilated for her own use.

The compiler of cookbooks as artist? Perhaps. But as political critic? We do not often rank cookbooks as literature, let alone as the occasion, whether covert or explicit, for political commentary. We may be readier to grant the connections between cooking and creative expression in a more diffuse sense, interpreting the gendered labor of the kitchen as feminine artistry. "She could paint with one hand / Studying grapes and peaches / A bowl of pears she would later / Cut, peel and stew for dinner," Joan Aleshire begins her "Exhibition of Women Artists (1790–1900)," affirming both the homely labor involved in feeding "the colicky child" and the heroic work of transforming this domestic practice into the subject of art.^[3]

Students of American folk art have for some time been insisting that we acknowledge the previous centuries' "song fests . . . sewing, and sharing [of] favorite recipes" not merely as testaments to the exigencies of women's lives but as creative expressions in their own right. The editors of Artists in Aprons argue that because such domestic art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not explicitly contravene dominant social values but, rather, appeared to conform to the prescribed domestic role of women, its producers could often work relatively freely, undeterred by many of the obstacles set in the paths of professional women artists.^[4] Writers on women's culinary texts agree. Alan Grubb's assessment of late-nineteenth-century Southern cookbooks as having generally been "published locally and in limited editions" suggests that modesty of scale may be, at least in part, what allows women to use this genre as a literary entrée.^[5] His acknowledgment that the authors' prefaces reveal "the life stories of

these women and those for whom they wrote" calls attention to the way in which collective affirmation can open into personal narrative, while his description of Jessie C. Benedict's The Blue Ribbon Cook Book (1904) as autobiographical as well as culinary—"We learn, somewhat surprisingly (in that her book is otherwise simply a recipe book), how her own experience as a homemaker laid the basis of her subsequent 'career'"—anticipates the hybrid texts home economist Fabiola Cabeza de Baca was to write in New Mexico some four decades later.^[6] Tey Diana Rebolledo's distinction between storytelling and story writing is also useful here: "It was acceptable for women to be the storytellers, although not the story writers," she argues of midcentury Hispanas like Cabeza de Baca and Cleofas Jaramillo; thus "the passing on of recipes" was a folkloristic activity specifically coded feminine.^[7]

As Rebolledo and other literary critics are beginning to argue, the exchange of recipes may communicate more than the culinary. In "Recipes for Reading: Summer Pasta, Lobster à la Riseholme, and Key Lime Pie," Susan Leonardi analyzes recipes as "highly embedded discourse akin to literary discourse,"^[8] and she identifies this language practice as a gender-inflected one:

In the earlier Joy , the establishment of a lively narrator with a circle of enthusiastic and helpful friends reproduces the social context of recipe sharing—a loose community of women that crosses the social barriers of class, race, and generation. Many women can attest to the usefulness and importance of this discourse: mothers and daughters—even those who don't get along well otherwise—old friends who now have little in common, mistresses and their "help," lawyers and their secretaries—all can participate in this almost prototypical feminine activity. (342–43)

Before commenting on this compelling reappraisal of an apparently mundane practice, I would like to juxtapose against it two additional comments about recipe-sharing, framed not by food critics but by food writers:

While calling upon and taking one of my Spanish recipe cookbooks to one of my neighbors, our conversation for the moment centered around Spanish recipes. "Have you seen the article in Holland Magazine written by Mrs. D? " she inquired. I had not seen it, so she gave me the magazine to take home to read it. It was a three-page article, nicely written and illustrated, but very deficient as to knowledge of our Spanish cooking. In giving the recipe for mak-

ing tortillas it read, "Mix bread flour with water, add salt." How nice and light these must be without yeast or shortening! And still these smart Americans make money with their writing, and we who know the correct way sit back and listen.^[9]

Diana Kennedy, the authoritative cultural missionary for the foods of Mexico, has been decorated with the Order of the Aztec Eagle, the highest honor of its kind bestowed on foreigners by the Mexican government. In addition to this now classic and definitive cookbook, she is the author of The Tortilla Book, Mexican Regional Cooking, and Nothing Fancy and she travels widely promoting authentic Mexican cuisine.^[10]

So aptly does Kennedy, the "ultimate authority, the high priestess, of Mexican cooking,"^[11] personify the "smart American" of Jaramillo's cultural critique that if three decades did not separate the promotional paean from the political complaint, it would be tempting to resolve the twin images of Ms. Kennedy and Mrs. D into a single overzealous evangelícal. That the author of The Art of Mexican Cooking: Traditional Mexican Cooking for Aficionados and the now anonymous writer for Holland Magazine are in fact not one but two distinct missionaries for the intercultural faith does not, of course, date Jaramillo's criticism. Rather, the persistence of American forays into foreign ground—cultural rather than geographical here—merely makes such a critique more pointed.

Leonardi's thesis that a cookbook is a literary production deserving of critical comment is compelling. But in light of passages like the two quoted here, her affirmation of recipe-sharing as a practice uniting women across "social barriers" begs to be reconsidered. Precisely because art—in this case, the art of cooking—is produced, as Leonardi herself indicates, within a specific social context, it encodes a political problematic. I would like to refocus inquiry on the "barriers of class, race, and generation" which Leonardi invokes only to transcend, in order to suggest that we read the "embedded discourse" of the cookbook not as an archetypally feminine language but rather as a form of writing which, if gender-coded, is also a culturally contingent production. What kind of ideological impulses are operating in a cookbook like The Art of Mexican Cooking: Traditional Mexican Cooking for Aficionados, whose title calls attention to the representation of a specific culture and the authority of "aficionados" to reproduce it in a text circulated for the benefit of English speakers? When

does recipe-sharing, that is, become recipe-borrowing, with only a coerced "consent" from the domestic "help?"^[12]

While The Gastronomic Me may strike some critics of autobiography and ethnography as a peculiar kind of self-reflexive text, the equations its author establishes between the presentation of recipes and the articulation of a self are clearly not idiosyncratic to M. F. K. Fisher. If writing of global food traditions in this case fashions the speaker-writer as culture plunderer, describing regional food traditions can enable self-reflexive writing to invoke "a sense of place and belonging," as Tey Diana Rebolledo indicates of the folkloristic narratives of Cleofas Jaramillo.^[13] Developed out of a distinct geographical locale, a recipe may invoke a context rich in historical resonance, political association, and cultural permanence. Or, as Ntozake Shange explains of the recipes interwoven into her 1982 novel Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo: "'I didn't want readers to skip over the recipes. . . . I wanted those recipes to create a place to be.'"^[14] The reproduction of recipes provides "a direct link to history," as Marialisa Calta writes in a review of Laura Esquivel's best-selling novel Like Water for Chocolate (1992): "Everyone's past is locked up in their recipes. . . . The past of an individual and the past of a nation as well."^[15]

Particularly for ethnic women writers, whose race or class may seem to preclude access to "high art" and its literary forms, the very domestic and commonplace quality of cooking makes it an attractive metonym for culture. For such autobiographers, presenting a family recipe and figuring its circulation within a community of readers provides a metaphor that is nonthreatening in its apparent avoidance of overt political discourse and yet culturally resonant in its evocation of the relation between the labor of the individual and her conscious efforts to reproduce familial and cultural traditions and values. The reproduction of such dishes as okra gumbo and huevos rancheros works to maintain cultural specificity in the face of assimilative pressures that attempt to amalgamate cultures in the "melting pot." At the same time, the series of imperatives the exchange of any recipe requires—the "cut" and "soak," "simmer" and "season" which enable readers to reproduce the writer's culinary art—gesture toward a sense of authority. These directives—orders, really—bespeak a kind of command, however limited in scope. The preliminary kind of authority exercised here suggests that reproducing a recipe, like retelling a story, may act both as cultural practice and autobiographical assertion; it may, as Esquival asserts,

recollect "the past of an individual and the past of a nation as well." The act of passing down recipes from mother to daughter, then, not only provides an apt metaphor for the reproduction of culture across generations but also creates a figurative home space from within which the "I" can begin the process of self-articulation.^[16]

The recollections of Jesusita Aragón, a midwife working in Las Vegas, New Mexico, demonstrate this conjunction of cooking practice and self-assertion. Ostracized by her family after she gave birth to two children as a single mother, Aragón recounts her difficult circumstances in such a way as to demonstrate her eventual triumph over them. Her narrative, as edited by Fran Leeper Buss in La Partera: Story of a Midwife, works to resituate the exile, the family ec-centric, called "Amigo" by the father who would have preferred a son, in a position central and indispensable to a more expansively defined community which encompasses both the women she helps in labor and her familial relations.^[17] Significantly, reconciliation with her grandmother takes place over the careful and loving preparation of a meal:

After my grandfather died, I ask her, "Who are you going to stay with, Grandma?" She says "My sons, not you." But she didn't last too long with them. No, she went back to me. And I buy a little goat, and I have green chili, and I make tortillas, a good supper. When she came she said, "Oh, it smells good here. "And I told her, "Yes, come in. You can eat with me, too." And she said, "I won't go back to my sons again. I will stay with you. If you want me to." And I told her, "Yes, you're welcome." (45)

The savor of "good" food indicates the moral lesson this recollection provides: Aragón's own goodness in forgiving her grandmother for her persistent censure.^[18] Documenting her strength and resourcefulness in the face of familial neglect, the description of the carefully prepared supper enables the speaker to locate herself in the authoritative position of mother to her grandmother, providing this maternal predecessor with spiritual and cultural nourishment.

The connection between culture and identity toward which Ralph Ellison's "I yam what I yam" gestures in Invisible Man appears repeatedly in the culinary autobiographies of American women. In her cookbook Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons: Africa's Gifts to New World Cooking, Jessica Harris recollects her mother's cooking and implicitly attests to the relation-

ships among cooking, culture, and colonialism. "My mother, who trained as a dietician but was discouraged from work in the food presentation field in which she excelled because of her race, took her talents home," Harris writes. "Each night was a feast. No frozen dinners or cake mixes ever crossed our threshold. Made-from-scratch cakes, flaky pie crusts, and intricate finger sandwiches went along with the traditional African-inspired foods that my father loved."^[19]

Maya Angelou more explicitly invokes food as the signifier of political well-being. Indicting what she sees as the Ghanaian penchant for things European, a West African woman in All God's Children Wear Traveling Shoes decries the absence of rice—a traditional African staple—at the university cafeteria as a way of critiquing the inability of Ghanaian culture-makers to use indigenous culture as the foundation for a healthy body politic: "'No rye? Again, 'No rye? What fa country you peepo got? . . . You peepo, you got your Black Star Square. You got your university, but you got no rye! You peepo! ' She began to laugh sarcastically. 'You make me laugh. Pitiful peepo.'"^[20]

The invocation of a specific food speaks on behalf of cultural nationalism here. The elaboration of cooking techniques may equally provide a means of articulating an ethnic subject, however.^[21] In her 1945 autobiography, Fifth Chinese Daughter, Jade Snow Wong devotes a considerable portion of one chapter to an extended description of a Chinese dinner she cooks for an interracial group of schoolmates. A narrative of assimilation gives way, for one reading moment, to an affirmation of cultural difference, as the author reproduces her recipes for "egg foo young" and "tomato-beef" in extended detail. In her follow-up to her description of cooking techniques, Wong clearly indicates that she designs this kind of cultural reproduction to be circulated for the benefit of a non-Chinese audience when she follows up her description of cooking techniques with this proverbial gesture: "[She] found that the girls were perpetually curious about her Chinese background and Chinese ideologies, and for the first time she began to formulate in her mind the constructive and delightful aspects of the Chinese culture to present to non-Chinese" (161). While this coda explicitly reaffirms on the gastronomic level the ideology of the melting pot her "perpetually curious" readers might well expect to see reinstated, the very attention to a specific cultural practice as figured

through a feminine discourse apparently bereft of political implications opens a space—if only at the subtextual level—within which the author can affirm a tradition decisively Chinese American. In effect, this passage declares Jade Snow Wong's intention to shape her friends—and her readers'—perceptions of Chinese American culture.^[22]

More important, by constructing an empowering image of cultural tradition out of her own cooking labor, the autobiographer writes herself into a prominent place in the narrative. Her apparently casual invitation to dinner, accepted with alacrity by friends Wen-Lien, Teruko, and Harriet, allows her to assert herself as deserving of attention as it simultaneously implies their cultural deficit: "Within half an hour, her comrades had raised Jade Snow high in their estimation. To be worthy of this new trust, Jade Snow racked her brains to decide what dishes she could cook without a Chinese larder" (158). This apparently tentative appropriation of the limelight is repeated several pages later when the writer describes a dinner she cooks for a group of world-renowned musicians staying with her employer, the dean of Mills College. Again the explicit text works to erase cultural difference while the underlying message affirms both Chinese culture and the author's autobiographical presence:

That was a wonderful evening. . . . For the first time Jade Snow felt an important participant in the role of hostess. Because of everyone's interest in the kitchen preparations, she soon lost her shyness in the presence of celebrities and acted naturally. There was no talk about music, only about Chinese food. And Jade Snow ceased thinking of famous people as "those" in a world apart. She had a glimpse of the truth, that the great people of any race are unpretentious, genuinely honest, and nonpatronizing in their interest in other human beings. (172–73)

Ostensibly celebrating "universal" moral values, her praise of the performers nevertheless allows Jade Snow Wong to construct a subject who, if located in the modest role of "hostess," is yet "important" as the recipient of the homage of "famous people." Significantly, it is the representation of racial difference that enables this kind of self-assertion. Like the talk of the musicians, the chapter itself speaks not so much about the accomplishments of the celebrities, nor even about the virtues people share regardless of race, but instead " about Chinese food."^[23]

The Conflict over Culture: Some Discursive Contexts

I would like to explore this symbiosis of autobiographical act and cultural affirmation in a reading of cookbooks by two New Mexican writers, Cleofas Jaramillo and Fabiola Cabeza de Baca.^[24] The folkloristic narratives Jaramillo published over the course of two decades, beginning in 1939 with a collection of stories she called Cuentos del Hogar and culminating in 1955 with her sustained autobiographical project, Romance of a Little Village Girl, insist upon an identity informed by region, community, and history. So, too, Cabeza de Baca's narrative of her youth on a ranch near Las Vegas, New Mexico, We Fed Them Cactus, explains selfhood as developing out of a specific geographical locale which the book places, if obliquely, in a political context. Like these texts, though less explicitly, the culinary histories both women published also define an engaged subjectivity, anticipating the later personal narratives by providing for the beginnings of an autobiographical assertion that is matrixed geographically, culturally, and socially. They demonstrate, too, how political circumstance—in this case the struggle for control of Mexican culture that succeeds the struggle for proprietorship of Mexican land—helps to shape both the way people conceive of themselves and the manner in which they speak this sense of selfassertion. Self-reflection in both narratives is accordingly complicated by political and literary history—by the demands of the publishing world and of the languages available to Hispanas writing during the first half of the twentieth century.^[25]

Working as a home demonstration agent for New Mexico from the 1910s through the 1930s, Fabiola Cabeza de Baca published, in addition to We Fed Them Cactus and a number of cookbooks celebrating nuevomexicano traditions, a series of pamphlets through the New Mexico State Agricultural Extension Service that were designed to instruct rural Hispanas in the new housekeeping and cooking methods currently being promoted by the U.S. government following the passage of the Smith-Lever Act in 1914.^[26] Her activities as an " agent " placed her in the position of cultural mediator between the Hispanosûwhom the state clearly considered her a representative of as well as for —and the Anglo-American business interests that were being promoted by the government's discourse of technological "advancement." To the extent that they recirculate this lan-

guage of "the march of progress," Cabeza de Baca's two pamphlets "Boletín de Conservar" (1931) and "Los Alimentos y Su Preparación " (1934) reflect the compromising—as well as compromised—role their author occupied in working on behalf of a government agency as eager to assume ignorance, incivility, and inability on the part of its Hispano residents as it was willing to trumpet the advantages of Eastern farm and housekeeping methods over the nuevomexicano and Native American practices more appropriate to the arid environment Anglo "pioneers" were attempting to improve through industrialization.

In "Canning Comes to New Mexico: Women and the Agricultural Extension Service 1914–1919, "historian Joan Jensen characterizes the response of Hispanas to the work of Cabeza de Baca and other home demonstration agents as less than enthusiastic, "Hispanic women, unlike Anglo women, did not feel at home in school houses or public buildings. They also preferred meeting without Anglo women. 'It is not possible to combine demonstrations for English and Spanish-speaking people even when they can all be reached by one language,' wrote one agent, 'because the Spanish-speaking people will not come to a meeting called for both. They are very retiring and can best be reached in small groups'" (213). It is not difficult to read in this recalcitrance a resistance to the pressures of assimilation that were being exerted upon the women by means of a critique of their domestic work practices. Jensen herself acknowledges that the state's efforts to emphasize the virtues of "modernization" encoded a very conservative cultural agenda. Focusing here on the government's interruption of Navajo tradition by forcing families to send at least one child away to boarding school, she comments:

At the McKinley County School for Navajos, for example, matrons apparently taught the young girls to can in 1918, though there was little chance that they would use these skills on the reservation. It was, however, part of the national program to replace traditional skills of the Indian woman with skills that would make them more dependent upon the Euro-American culture and occupy the place women were assigned in that culture. (205)

But what of Cabeza de Baca's own efforts to further the march of progress through the state of New Mexico? In marked contrast to later publications celebrating the nuevomexicano past as an Edenic era of abundance, prosperity, and self-sufficiency (consider, for instance, the author's two

cookbooks. The Good Life: New Mexico Traditions and Food and Historic Cookery, both published in 1949), "Los Alimentos y Su PreparaciÓn " reproduces the future-oriented discourse of progress employed by the state, often as justification for land fraud, illegal business practices, and the attempt at cultural obliteration. Paralleling changes in food preparation with changes in "civilization," Cabeza de Baca introduces this domestic instruction manual with an assertion half apologetic, half imperative: "Cada día hay una nueva invenciÓn y nuevos descubrimientos de la ciencia y todos estamos listos para adoptarlos" (Every day there is a new invention and new scientific discoveries and we are all ready to adopt them).^[27] Framing assimilation as the inexorable and inevitable outcome of history, Cabeza de Baca reproduces the state's teleology of industrial growth: "En esta época de progreso y descubrimientos científicos hay que seguir la marcha, no sÓlo en el modo de vivir, sino que también en el modo de comer" (In this era of progress and scientific discoveries it is necessary to follow the trend, not only in one's style of life, but also in one's style of eating) (3). The politics of cooking here make a virtue of necessity, as progress sweeps from the urban to the rural sector:

para progresar en el modo de vivir debíamos que estar listos para aprender como alimentarnos para conservarnos saludables.; De que sirve tener los mejores automÓbiles, las mejoras carreteras, las mejores escuelas, y todo lo mejor del mundo si no falta la salud? El pueblo que no se alimenta propriamente no puede producir y mantener una civilizaciÓn prÓspera y fuerte. (4)

In order to progress in our way of life we must be ready to learn how to eat in order to maintain our health. What use does having the best cars, the best highways, the best schools, and the best of everything in the world serve if we don't have our health? The town that doesn't nourish itself properly can't produce and maintain a prosperous and strong civilization.

Eating "properly" is to good bodily health what building the best cars, highways, and schools is to a strong body politic. Despite Cabeza de Baca's emphasis on the relation between good nourishment and good health—and here one marvels at the fortitude with which the preceding four centuries of Hispanos have prospered, bereft, apparently, of this capability—learning how to eat "properly" has a great deal more to do with accommodating to cultural change than it does with building strong bodies twelve ways.

The bright tone of this pronouncement notwithstanding, the appeal to as-

similate carries with it a cost. Writing to women, the home demonstration worker defines cultural accommodation in the language of home management. Good table manners signify superior comportment, she asserts, and

Una persona que tiene buenos modales en el modo de comer considerá superior a una que no los tiene. Es una de las pruebas de tener educación o buena crianza. Si la madre enseña a sus hijos seguir buenos modales de mesa cada día, no tendrá que avergonzar cuando tengan huéspedes. (44)

A person who has good table manners will be considered superior to one who doesn't have them. This is one of the proofs of having an education or being well brought up. If the mother teaches her children to use good table manners every day, she will not have to be ashamed when she has guests.

Superiority or shame: the subjugated must become convinced of their own desire for subjugation.^[28] Here women, the reproducers of culture because of their work of child-rearing, are urged to internalize the political dictates—framed as moral lessons—of the state discourse on home improvement. Cooking does not so much embody culture in this text, it turns out, as obliterate it. If "Los Alimentos y Su PreparaciÓn "explicitly appeals to its female readers' experience of maternal obligation, the pamphlet, complete with photos depicting the proper way to use knife, fork, and spoon and instructions detailing the "Reglas para Poner y Como Servir la Mesa" (Rules for Setting and Serving at the Table) (41), ultimately addresses its audience not as parental educators but as children themselves, culturally speaking, requiring instruction in the new rules of the Anglo table.

Cooking and Colonialism: Speaking against Cultural Appropriation

The public worker must be sympathetic with people she works with regardless of their background or extraction; she must respect their customs, their habits and beliefs; and foremost she must know that though individuals may differ, people are people in any language, race, or creed .
Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, "New Mexican Diets "

A pamphlet on table manners may seem a rather slight subject with which to examine how cultural appropriation figures in works by American

women writers. Yet, like Jaramillo's complaint about tortilla-making, which associates the authenticity of a recipe with the integrity of a culture, Cabeza de Baca's juxtaposition of "el modo de vivir" with "el modo de comer" is a gesture made repeatedly by Hispano writers concerned with the maintenance of cultural practices in the wake of the 1848 United States conquest of northern Mexico.^[29] For women, this attention to the pressures of acculturation often takes the form not of explicit political statements but, rather, of a land of composite genre: a combination of familial reminiscence and personal narrative, of descriptions of custom, history, food, and folklore. In the three decades between the 1930s and the 1950s, both Fabiola Cabeza de Baca and Cleofas Jaramillo published narratives integrating recipes " with accounts of folk life, as if the female sense of rootedness and place is passed down through the distinctive foods nature offers," as Tey Diana Rebolledo has noted.^[30] This attention to "rootedness" and "place," I would suggest, framed as it is in a feminine culinary discourse apparently far removed from the sphere of political contention, nevertheless provides the two writers, whose sex and position within landed families would discourage the voicing of explicit discontent with Americano policy, with a means of critiquing it.

Home economics, in other words, serves as a suitably genteel forum for theorizing about the social and political economy. In "New Mexican Diets" Cabeza de Baca develops this nutritional pedagogy quite explicitly, as the essay ' s concluding lesson, excerpted above, makes clear.^[31] In this piece Cabeza de Baca juxtaposes the dietary changes occasioned by the Spanish "conquest" with the shift in food preparation following the "American occupation," in order to establish a syntactical parallel which is political as well, a comparison which equates the first conquest with the second, denying those historical euphemisms that redefine a hostile military invasion as a welcomed or at least unresisted "annexation." Setting "Spanish" and "American" takeovers in apposition allows Cabeza de Baca to define them as oppositional as well. The "Spaniard" both "improved" the eating habits of Native Americans, she suggests, and adapted to theirs: "Like all pioneers [the Spaniard] had to be resourceful and adaptive; therefore, he learned the food habits of the Indians. Likewise, the Indian adopted many of the food habits of the Spaniard." Not so with the "American" takeover. While "some of the urban people adopted the food habits of the newcomers," de Baca writes, "the isolated rural population changed little."

Through a critique of the inferior nutritional quality of these "poorer urban diets," diets explicitly linked to the "newcomers," she simultaneously indicts the cultural impoverishment of the nonnatives who followed "the coming of the railroad" and affirms native cultural practice. In addition, she refuses to accede to racist jeers like the following: " 'Give [the Spanish people] beans and chili and that is all they need.' "Instead of reading such modest needs as a sign of poverty, she insists, we should see such collective "self-reliance" as a means of countering ethnocentrism and of honoring cultural integrity. In arguing that "the people were not poor since they owned their homes, produced all their foods, and with a little additional income that the men could pick up were self-sufficient " (668), Cabeza de Baca thus exploits the edible trope in order to reaffirm the strategic value of cultural separatism.

Published just seven years later, the author's Historic Cookery appears more sentimental than argumentative. Descriptions of food and its preparation resonate with nostalgia for an Edenic past; as with Proust's concisely symbolic madeleines, evocations of flavors and cooking methods work efficiently to recall an entire way of life. "Try the recipes," she urges. "And when you do, think of New Mexico's golden days, of red chile drying in the sun, of clean-swept yards, outdoor ovens, and adobe houses on the landscape. Remember the green valleys where good things grow. And think too of families sitting happily at tables " (2). Yet, like its more obviously tutelary predecessor, this cookbook evokes the flavors of the past in order to critique the cultural present. Echoing the "New Mexican Diets" reading of "our basic foods—chile, beans . . . and whole grain cereals" as "increasingly popular" because "highly nutritious" (1–2), the author reaffirms the value of New Mexican cultural practice. "Chile drying" and "clean-swept yards" are indications of a well-ordered life; descriptions of the domestic economy, where "good things grow," reflect the health of the Hispano community before it was besieged by Anglo land speculators, its culture "re-covered" by white intellectuals.

Clearly Cabeza de Baca's description of familial and community harmony is modeled after nonnative accounts of Hispano culture, its nostalgic evocation complicit in a folkloric discourse that romanticizes both the land and its people as suspended in a land of glorious sunset of fast-fading primitive rituals. Yet by defining cultural practice as conscious choice, she asserts the cultural agency of the New Mexicans whose lives she depicts.^[32]

Emphasizing the labor that is involved in the reproduction of cultural practices, in other words, however sentimentalized and class-conscious such representations may be, does work (at least on the textual level) against the politics of assimilation, insisting on a historically grounded sense of cultural specificity and maintaining an ethnic difference which in turn provides the self with a certain authority to speak. Thus the rose-colored tribute to "New Mexico's golden days," with its description of "historic" (read "unadulterated") Hispano cooking and pointed lack of reference to more contemporary cooking methods enables Cabeza de Baca to develop an unspoken comparison between the richness of traditional nuevomexicano life and the paucity of the presumably nonnative reader's "modern" cultural practices.

That the brief but tartly phrased admonishment of Romance of a Little Village Girl, with its proprietary emphasis on "our Spanish cooking," is, like Cabeza de Baca's romance of sun and adobe, aimed at Anglo appropriation of Hispano culture more generally becomes clear if we look more closely at the text by Jaramillo that precedes its publication. A response in part to the aplomb with which the Mrs D's of her day marketed recipes not of their own making, The Genuine New Mexico Tasty Recipes is not simply a catalogue of recipes correcting the absence of yeast and shortening. Instead, by employing food and food preparation within the context of personal narrative as metonyms for the whole of traditional Hispano cultural practice, it reaffirms and maintains that practice. After a series of "Spanish" recipes—and note that this formulation is itself a colonial one, suppressing Native American contributions to New Mexican culture^[33] —Jaramillo reprints a series of chapters from Shadows of the Past^[34] describing, as Genaro Padilla notes, "familial and community occasions that contextualize the very preparation and consumption of food" (55).

It is such a cultural context—and, more specifically, who is authorized to describe it—that is at issue in this text. The very title of the book, with its insistence on authenticity, foregrounds nuevomexicano tradition, as represented by the culinary, as subject to appropriation. To assert that the recipes in one's cookbook are the genuine article is, after all, to imply that fabrications—nonauthentic recipes—exist. Emphasizing the antiquity of her collection (the subtitle reads," Old and Quaint Formulas for the Preparation of Seventy-Five Delicious Spanish Dishes"), Jaramillo ensures that the bloodlines of her culinary products are pure, or nearly so.^[35]

"In this collection of Spanish recipes, "she announces," only those used in New Mexico for centuries are given, excepting one or two Old Mexico recipes " (1). While this attention to cultural commodification may clearly be read as a critical move on Jaramillo's part, the very act of eulogizing Hispano tradition as "quaint"—an artifact, that is—suggests that this critique is itself intended to be circulated extra-culturally. As Padilla argues:

On the one hand. Tasty Recipes represents the popularization of ethnic cuisine, and, in that respect, represents a desire to cater to members of the dominant culture. On the other, Jaramillo contextualizes consumption in an explicitly cultural manner, and, therefore, suggests how intimately food is related to lived cultural experience. Hence, we discover a form of culinary resistance—Anglo-Americans can—follow the recipe and still not eat nuevomexicano cooking. (55)

Yet, in The Genuine New Mexico Tasty Recipes, food is invested not only with a cultural register ultimately inaccessible to the nonnative, but with a more overtly political signification as well. By historicizing his sister's evocation of food traditions, Reyes N. Martínez in his introduction to the book directs readers to draw connections between good nutrition and good government:

The early settlers introduced certain lands of foods to this section of the country, which, although occasionally used now, are not appreciated for their nutritive and health value. No one questions the evidence of the superior physical ruggedness of the past generations of that era in comparison with that of their descendants of the present day, who, although enjoying the advantages of modern science and research along the lines of dietetics, do not generally attain the natural constitutional ruggedness of body that tradition tells us their ancestors possessed. (28)

Compare this insistence on the better health of previous generations with the future-extolling text of Cabeza de Baca's "Los Alimentos":

Hay personas que afirman que nuestros antepasados guardaban mejor salud y vivían mís años sin saber nada de la propia nutriciÓn: estas eran las excepciones. Esto puede ser verdad hasta cierto punto. . . . El modo de vivir de nuestros antepasados era mas favorable para la salud. Con el progreso y civilización de la naciÓn, el modo de vivir ha cambiado y el resultado es que el modo de comer tiene que cambiar. (4)

There are people who argue that our ancestors kept themselves in better health and lived longer without knowing anything about proper nutrition: these were the exceptions. That can be true up to a certain point. . . . Our ancestors' lifestyle was more healthful. With progress and the civilization of the nation, the way of living has changed and the result is that the way we eat has to change.

Taking up the dominant culture's discourse of progress—that language of "dietetics" adopted in "Los Alimentos" to justify apparently unavoidable cultural accommodations—Martinez's appeal to science turns this language of the inevitable back upon itself. Here, affirming "the advantages of modern science" does not celebrate the encroachment of Anglo business interests upon a rural state of small landholders and self-sufficient homesteads, but, rather, critiques such a political situation as unhealthy. Martínez's historical distinction between "early settlers" and "their descendants of the present day, "between" natural constitutional ruggedness" and the artificial "advantages of modern science," thus encodes a racial inflection as well. The loss of cultural integrity and authority is articulated through a parable about the devaluing of "traditional foods." Resonating with Jaramillo's insistence on the authenticity and antiquity of her collection, Martínez's generational focus here suggests that, like the Spanish colonists themselves, foods can have a lineage; the genuine landholders, whose land grants derive from the rulers of sixteenth-century Spain, eat The Genuine New Mexico Tasty Recipes . Just as those foods introduced by the conquistadores and enjoyed by their descendants resulted in good health, so abandoning them and replacing them with modern ("white") substitutes will produce a people who are less constitutionally sound. Clearly I am distorting the studiedly neutral tone of Martínez's brief historical commentary by subjecting it to such extensive analysis and sardonic paraphrasing. Nevertheless, because the passage simultaneously draws an implicit parallel between cooking and culture and refuses to glorify science despite a publishing environment celebrating its advancements, it does embody a certain resistance to the rhetoric of assimilation.

Even a cursory glance at the contemporary literature produced by nonnatives demonstrates that such a critique is neither inordinately defensive nor unfairly acerbic. Like Jaramillo's own preface to The Genuine New Mexico Tasty Recipes, Erna Fergusson's introductory remarks to her 1934 Mexican Cookbook stress the authenticity of her culinary catalogue. " The

recipes in this book, "she affirms," are limited to those which were in common use when the province of New Mexico was a part of the Republic of Mexico."^[36] Like the folklorist author of Shadows of the Past and Cuentos del Hogar, Fergusson is concerned to demarcate, using food as a signifier, a series of cultural traditions: "Nothing more surely reflects the life of a people, "Fergusson asserts," than what they ate and how they prepared it" (4).

Yet, while Jaramillo's project is to recover nuevomexicano customs in a gesture of ethnic pride, however muted, Fergusson's interest is precisely in appropriating such practices on behalf of "national interests." Defining Mexican food in her foreword as "part of the Southwestern diet . . . since the 'American Occupation,' "the author traces the acceptance of" slowly-cooked and richly condimented dishes "by" people who could not even pronounce their names " in order to insist that such recipes " represent Mexican cookery that belongs to the U.S. "Cultural appropriation is thus justified by a political event, the military takeover of Mexico by the United States. Fergusson's awareness that her coercive culinary history of the Southwest does in some measure reiterate the forced invasion of the region she speaks of becomes clear later in the book, when she prefaces a series of recipes for tortillas with this derisive but nonetheless anxious comment about cultural authority: "The only way to be sure of making tortillas correctly is to have a line of Indian ancestry running back about 500 years" (88). If her recipes for corn and wheat tortillas lack yeast, then, readers have been duly warned.

Yet it is cultural rather than culinary blunders that are most arresting here. In her chapter on "Mexican Cooking Then and Now," a history of cooking methods, Fergusson expends a substantial amount of narrative energy justifying the "'American Occupation'" by juxtaposing the "modern cook in a modern kitchen "with the "primitive conditions" of traditional domestic life (3, 5). If Cabeza de Baca's "Los Alimentos" reluctantly espouses the new housekeeping and cooking methods as inevitable given the forward movement of "el progreso y civilizaciÓn de la naciÓn," Fergusson's text actively maligns Hispano cultural practices through a series of racist clichés. Consider, for instance, the caustic sarcasm of this passage:

The menus are based on meals as served at a gentleman's table before the general adoption of American ways. Then eating was a serious matter, inter-

fered with only by famine, war, or Lent. The day began with a preliminary breakfast in bed; coffee or chocolate and sweet rolls. About nine o'clock came the real breakfast which included eggs or meat and more bread and coffee. After that the Señora put in her heavy work of unlocking cupboards, storerooms, and chests; of dispensing food for the day; and of directing her servants. Naturally she felt fagged by 11 and ready for the caldo colado or clear soup, which came as a pick-me-up at that hour. (6)

Small wonder, given this land of representation of the nuevomexicano rancheros, that Jaramillo felt called upon to exact literary justice. The romantic picture of wealthy family life described for us in the pages of The Genuine New Mexico Tasty Recipes, a scene of "warm harvest sunlight" and "golden wheat and oats, stacked high on round, earthen  . . . threshing grounds" (21), is thus in some measure a defensive portrait, its emphatically celebratory rhetoric a compensatory literary strategy. The impression of rural life here is one of busy industry and "self-sustaining" plenty, a harmony of blue corn and yellow wheat, a perpetual "Indian summer" where "servants and children" enjoy the harvest plenty in a bucolic landscape unmarked by time (21). This "historical amnesia" which, as Genaro Padilla notes, is characteristic of Jaramillo's work as a whole, clearly works as a palliative for the all too immediate economic losses and cultural conflict suffered by landed families like hers during the early years of the century. So, too, the author's insistence on maintaining a feudalistic stability of rich and poor works as an implicit indictment of the contemporary, less happy relation between Hispanos and Anglos. In such a context of cultural contention, the sentimentalized picture of "peones [working] happily, taking great interest in doing their best for the patrón, whom they held in great esteem and respect" (24), provides a critique of race relations precisely contingent upon a suturing of class conflict. Likewise, given the collective loss of self-confidence post-1848, the representation of Jaramillo as authoritative subject is to a certain extent dependent upon the objectification of "Lupe" as "our Indian cook" (23). The proprietary address subsumes both ethnic and class divisions, constructing a whole Hispano Subject greater than the sum of its cross-cultural parts.

This glowing picture of village life is not exclusive to Jaramillo ' s The Genuine New Mexico Tasty Recipes but in fact characterizes both Cabeza de Baca's Historic Cookery and her 1949 celebration of Hispano food and custom, The Good Life: New Mexico Traditions and Food, as well. I have

previously argued that in her earlier pamphlets undertaken as home economist for the state, the author neglects traditional domestic life in order to espouse the changes sanctioned by the government's agricultural "improvement" program. In The Good Life, by contrast, Cabeza de Baca does not look forward to some future technological utopia but instead gazes backward, recovering a history untranslatable in the dominant culture ' s lexicon of industrial progress.^[37] Ethnographic description in The Good Life, as in Jaramillo's Tasty Recipes, then, is nostalgic rather than analytic, with such chapter headings as "Winter's Plenty," "Christmas Festivities," and "The Wedding" celebrating that "happiness and abundant living" (4) the author describes as characteristic of the Hispano past. The emphasis on cultural self-sufficiency invoked by the "full splendor" of an "Autumn Harvest "recalls both the author's own Historic Cookery and Jaramillo's Tasty Recipes, as well as a series of other Mexicano personal narratives post-1848, in which the cataloguing of farm and field provides an implicit contrast between a harmonious, richly lived past and a more difficult present (5).^[38]

While the language of The Good Life often shrouds historical struggles in a romantic fog, the reader-response dynamic that the text sets up provides Cabeza de Baca with a means of articulating, albeit quietly, a form of cultural critique. The cookbook is particularly well suited for this kind of critique because it exhorts readers to gloss its text not only as a series of declarative statements (if we read without actually trying the recipes) but as a set of performative acts as well (when the recipes are not only read but reproduced). Ntozake Shange points to this kind of reading dynamic when she suggests that if a reader of her novel Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo should cook "'Rice Casserole #36,' ' a recipe of the tide character . . . or her 'Favorite Spinach,' that reader 'can be right in her kitchen, right in the book.' "^[39] Similarly, literary critic Susan Leonardi notes: "Like a narrative, a recipe is reproducible, and, further, its hearers-reader-sreceivers are encouraged to reproduce it, and, in reproducing it, to revise it and make it their own" (344). Leonardi is able to equate "reproducing" with "sharing" only by ignoring the inequities of power across "the social barriers of class, race, and generation" (342), but her emphasis on the performative aspect of cookbook reading is nevertheless a useful one for ethnographic inquiry. If the exhortation to reproduce a recipe may create a community, it may also call attention to the boundaries of such an affili-

alion, asking readers to question the conflations and the distinctions between the community constructed within the text itself and the community of readers created outside it.

Encouraging readers to reproduce, revise, and make a recipe their own enables Cabeza de Baca to call attention to cultural commodification in The Good Life; the text appears to encourage its audience to make "New Mexican Traditions and Food" their own, yet its author ultimately provides obstacles to such appropriation. "In order to have the dishes taste as one has eaten them in the New Mexican homes or genuine New Mexican restaurants, one must use New Mexican products," she counsels (45). As in Jaramillo's text, here "genuine" not only authenticates the writer but also works as a barrier to the reader. Ostensibly allowing for the possibility of extra-cultural access, on another level this admonishment to use "New Mexican products "divides nonnative readers from the Hispano community the book itself so wholeheartedly celebrates, thus resisting cultural abstraction and insisting on rootedness and a sense of place. Appending a glossary of Spanish terms to the book allows Cabeza de Baca to remind her readership that reproducing the recipes of The Good Life does not necessarily lead to cultural ownership. "The words in this glossary may have other meanings, "she asserts," but the one given here explains the meaning as used in this composition" (81). By calling attention to what is left over, the remainder that escapes translation, the author problematizes cultural access, depicting a web of associations and meanings ultimately ungraspable by the nonnative speaker.^[40]

Depictions of class conflict further complicate the text's representation of culture. As in Jaramillo's Tasty Recipes, cultural harmony in The Good Life is largely achieved at the expense of a sustained appraisal of class relations. This is not to say that relations between rancheros and peones are ignored, however. As in the author's later We Fed Them Cactus, in The Good Life anxiety about class conflict is relieved not by being overlooked but by being contained. Curiously, it is art that effects this defusing of class conflict in both of Cabeza de Baca's texts: consistently a laborer-artist simultaneously articulates the threat to the social order and resolves it. In The Good Life, the relation between art and politics is figured in Tilano, guitar-playing goatherder for Don Teodoro. His introduction early in the narrative indicates both the affiliation of manual and mental labor and the marginal status such a worker occupies. Note how this description

of the making of ristras (strings of dried red chiles) situates Tilano: "Men, women, and children joined in the task. Each one, seated on the ground, deftly started tying the pods. Tilano, the goat herder and storyteller, stood at the door waiting for his chance to get in a word" (6). As with Santiago, the grumbling ranch hand of We Fed Them Cactus whose critique of class inequities is replaced by the harmonies of his own corrido-singing, Tilano is encouraged to forget his political complaints when the patrón's wife, Dona Paula, urges him to exercise his musical skills instead:

"The Aleluyas say that there is no future in being a Roman Catholic and they told me that if I joined them I would not have to herd goats for you for such low wages, Don Teodoro." . . .

"Why don't you play the guitar for us Tilano," said Doña Paula. . . . Tilano did not need coaxing. No sooner had Doña Paula spoken than Tilano was playing familiar strains. Some of the young folks joined in by singing which made Tilano so happy that he forgot the Aleluyas." (6–7)

Cabeza de Baca's representation of art as the palliative to political ills is a very traditional one. To the extent that it is defined by the laboring goatherd rather than the leisured gentleman, however, it carries with it quite radical implications. It is the cooks and curanderas (healers), after all, who in producing stories and recipes reproduce the cultural practices which constitute the folkloric reminiscences of both We Fed Them Cactus and The Good Life . Granted, the figure of the working musician in The Good Life ultimately underwrites the rule of the wealthy by creating an art that reveals class conflict only to contain it. Nevertheless, what we see in both works are narratives sustained by the very people they explicitly work to keep down.

While the relationship between the Turrieta family and their servants structures The Good Life, this insistently affirmative picture of social harmony is itself sustained through a gendered metaphor of class obligations. If the culinary reminiscences in this text depict ethnicity as something that is actively reproduced, it is the working alliance between Señora Martina and Doña Paula through which such cultural labor is represented. Chapters titled "Autumn Harvest," "Christmas Festivities," and "Lent" celebrate nuevomexicano traditions through the year, but the labor involved in preparing for such cultural events remains a constant throughout the text. Indeed, the emphasis of the narrative is precisely on that labor, rather

than on the depictions of Hispano customs that the chapter titles would lead the reader to expect. And if it is through the representation of work itself—always a community effort in this text—that Cabeza de Baca locates Hispano ethnicity, it is the characteristically feminine labor of cooking to which she calls attention—both as signifying nourishment (material and moral) and as the active labor involved in providing for such cultural sustenance.

Although the book's nostalgic representation of cultural plenitude is contingent upon the joint labors of Señora Martina and Doña Paula, the vantage point from which readers observe this alliance does not accommodate both female subjects equally. We are initially introduced to "Señá Martina, "as she is familiarly called by Doña Paula, not as a distinct individual but, rather, as the type of the ageless, timeless curandera: "The medicine woman seemed so old to Doña Paula and she wondered how old she was. No one remembered when she was born. She had been a slave in the García family for two generations and that was all any one knew. She had not wanted her freedom, yet she had always been free " (14). Eulogizing her as "the medicine woman" positions Señora Martina with respect to Doña Paula, wife of the ranchero, and establishes a smoothly harmonious picture of relations between classes and cultures.

Succeeding references to 'The Herb Woman," however, emphasize not only Senora Martina's willingness to work on behalf of Dona Paula ("After greeting Doña Paula she sat down beside her and without being asked, she took over the task of slicing small squashes into circles in preparation for drying" [13]), but her resistance to cultural authority as well. It is Señora Martina who voices opposition to acculturation, as this process is signified by changes in the practices of medicine. While Doña Paula, whose voice is closely linked with that of the narrator, may argue on behalf of accommodation ("Diphtheria is contagious Señá Martina. It is better to let the doctor treat that" [15]), the curandera responds: "Be as you say—but I cured all my children without assistance from the doctor which I could not have afforded anyway. . . . Today [Juanito, my youngest] is as well as any one can be, although deaf, he is a healthy man" (15). If Senora Martina's stubbornness is treated a trifle sardonically here, the amount of narrative energy expended upon this figure suggests that her criticism of contemporary medical practices serves a significant function in the text.^[41] And comments like the following more explicitly contrast the well-being of the previous generations with the difficulties their modern counterparts face:

"When I was young," Señora Martina recalls, "there were no doctors and we lived through many sicknesses" (14). Comparing the competence of the curandera with the incapability of (presumably Anglo) doctors, I would argue, enables Cabeza de Baca to articulate a muted cultural critique. In addition, the meticulous detail with which the author lists herbs and their curative properties not only provides The Good Life with a model of cultural authenticity and antiquity but conveys practical information as well.^[42]

In 'Tradition and Mythology: Signatures of Landscape in Chicana Literature," Tey Diana Rebolledo notes that "in Hispanic folklore the curandera has always had more freedom of movement than other women. Cabeza de Baca saw the herb woman as not only freer but clearly outside the confines of society."^[43] Yet her "freedom" seems to me questionable, since it is defined on behalf of the class that benefits most from her labor, and her marginal status does more to provide the author with the measure of a wealthy Hispano society than it does to elevate this working-class figure herself. I would suggest that it is precisely Senora Martina's distance from the voice of the narrator, her position as cultural Other vis-à-vis the Turrieta family, that enables Cabeza de Baca to maintain her own position as cultural mediator in a narrative location that provides her with authority over her non-Hispano readership and simultaneously allows a (muted) critique of Anglo imperialism. This eulogy to the herb woman simultaneously provides Cabeza de Baca with a means of containing cultural difference (the relations between Hispanos and indígenos remain harmonious, in implicit comparison with the current Mericano-Anglo conflict) and with a way to articulate political difference (post-1848) without compromising the influence of her well-connected narrator. Senora Martina's censure of the medical establishment ("'I hope to live another year, for when I am gone my remedies go with me and the doctors will get fat from your generosity' "[18]) thus exploits the author's culinary trope for culture to provide her with a critique of it.

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.

Chapter Two—
"Same Boat, Different Stops":
Re-collecting Culture in Black Culinary Autobiography

Coming Home: Culinary Artistry and the Politics of Place

This largest forced migration [the Atlantic slave trade] in the history of mankind would transport untold numbers of African slaves from all areas of the continent to the New World, where their condition of servitude would result, more often than not, in their being responsible for the cooking in the Big Houses of the countries to which they were sent. Their service in the kitchen would, directly and subtly influence the tastes of most of the New World .
Jessica Harris, Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons: Africa's Gifts to New World Cooking

Sweet potato pies, a good friend of mine asked recently, "Do they taste anything like pumpkin?" Negative. They taste more like memory, if you're not uptown .
Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), "Soul Food"

Revising history to invoke cultural authority, redrawing borderlines ("Africa," "the New World," "uptown") to insist on prior claims over contested spaces, redefining idiosyncratic representation—memory—with its origins in culture and the social—in a generalized sense, many of the same con-

cerns which mark the culinary narratives of Hispanas of the 1930s and 1940s find currency in post-civil rights writings of black Americans on food: consider Leroi Jones' essay "Soul Food" (1962)^[1] or VertaMae Smart-Grosvenor's culinary autobiography Vibration Cooking (1970),^[2] for instance, as well as more contemporary African American women's cookbooks: Norma Jean and Carole Darden's Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine (1978) or Jessica Harris's Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons (1989), to name but two. As in Mexicana formulations where food becomes a metonym for culture, the edible in black American women's culinary autobiography is used to reconstruct cultural history, to ground familial reminiscence, and to figure autobiographical authority. Both kinds of "embedded discourse" interest themselves in revising master representations of history, in which people of color are most often figured as transient actors, the "homeless" of hegemonic texts. Likewise, we can read in midcentury Hispana and contemporary African American women's texts a similar attention to the mechanics of cultural commodification. Just as the writings of Cleofas Jaramillo and Fabiola Cabeza de Baca critique Anglo appropriation of Hispano culture, VertaMae Smart-Grosvenor calls attention to the exchange value of "soul food," implicating herself in this transaction when she describes her appearances on a televised Ethnic Week cooking series (xvi–xvii), and when she remarks in the introduction to her book, "Everybody's mama's cousin wanted a free copy of Vibration Cooking . After all, wasn't I exploiting and getting rich off their family recipes?" (xiv).

Although critical responses to hegemony mark the culinary autobiographies of both New Mexican and black women, their self-referencing strategies obviously speak to and out of distinctly different concerns and contexts. Chicano literature is engaged with the reappropriation of a culture changed but nevertheless maintained on its home ground. As the new proprietors of Mexican culture, Anglo literature works in the Southwest post-1848 to legitimize a violently acquired political tenure; the disruptive context and consequences of the Mexican-U.S. war are reflected in language which attempts to underwrite land seized by force with a kind of authorizing cultural "title." This history is differently refracted, of course, through a century of Mexicano narrative post-conquest. Californio literature, for instance, from María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's 1885 novel The Squatter and the Don , through Lorna Dee Cervantes's "Poema para los Californios Muertos" (1981) occupies itself in large part with redefining and asserting

the rights of the "native" population of the state, providing glosses on what constitutes culture and supplying representations of, as well as responsibility for, political agency and change.^[3]

The literature of black Americans demonstrates a very different relation to place, not insisting upon the cultural legacy and political responsibilities of a long-settled community, but re-collecting a culture scattered along with its people in the aftermath of the African diaspora. The task of distinguishing between what is "African" and what is "American" so as to define a series of black traditions indigenous to the United States thus takes on a particular urgency not shared by contemporary Chicano narrative and Mexican literature del otro lado .^[4] It is not surprising, given this historical problematic, that African American autobiographers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries often explore the relationship between subjectivity and place. Concern with what constitutes "home" is reflected in the critical literature as well: Joanne Braxton writes of the feminine tradition that "for the black woman in American autobiography, the literary act has been, more often than not, an attempt to regain that sense of place in the New World,"^[5] and Houston Baker asserts that "fixity is a function of power. Those who maintain place, who decide what takes place and dictate what has taken place, are power brokers of the traditional. The 'placeless,' by contrast, are translators of the nontraditional."^[6] If Baker's formulation too schematically frames place as power—consider the different relationship I have tried to articulate with respect to Mexicano narrative, for instance—his insistence that geography and identity are closely related in black texts, that dislocation, not a sense of permanence, characterizes black literature, is affirmed by a glance at even a very short list of autobiographical titles: Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography (1942), Maya Angelou's most recent autobiography, All God's Children Wear Traveling Shoes (1986), and Marita Golden's Migrations of the Heart (1983), for example.

Nor is the critique of the way in which culture is bought and sold articulated in the same way in the culinary autobiography of post-war black women and midcentury Hispanas. Cooking as a trope for the reproduction of culture has a long history in African American women's narratives. In an analysis of Victorian cookbooks of the American South, Alan Grubb cites a text by a white woman, Mary Stuart Smith's The Virginia Cookery Book (1885), for its recirculation of the "myth of the 'temperamental artist mammies.'" He goes on to cite this story of Smith's:

The most beautiful bread I ever saw was made by a poor creature only one degree removed from idiocy. . . . An old "aunty" in a Virginia homestead of the olden time made such exquisitely fair rolls, that a visitor asked leave to be permitted to have her recipev . With a droll and puzzled air the cook answered, "La! missus, I just know I dar'n't make 'em no different." The old woman could give no other recipe; she knew what to do, and did it.^[7]

When we read this anecdote against Nell Kane's recollections in Between Women , Judith Rollins's study of black domestic workers and their white employers, the cook's "puzzlement" looks more studied than accidental, and her vacant inability to reproduce her recipe reads as a covert effort to maintain control over the intellectual fruits of her cooking labor. If it is a full century removed from the "droll" antics catalogued in The Virginia Cookery Book , Kane's own withholding strategy nevertheless recalls the nineteenth-century cook's resistance:

I used to write up my own recipes. If I got an idea of something nice to serve, I would build a recipe up and try it. And if it was a success, I'd put it in this little book. I had created a lot of little decorations for their teas and dinners that I had written in there too. Whenever the ideas came, I'd write them down. And whenever you do, it's like a precious little thing that you do because you want to show your work.^[8]

Like Sarah Rice, who remembers in her autobiography He Included Me (1989) that her mother "could take a cookbook and then use her own ingenuity and imagination and invent wonderful things,"^[9] Kane's recollection dignifies a mundane labor by acknowledging its potential as an expressive art. For Kane, the cookbook is valuable because it testifies to her transformation of work in the service of another into a more dignified form of labor that creates and sustains self-respect. That her employer concurs in this perception of the domestic worker's literary labor is evident in the power struggle that ensues between the two women over control of this text, a struggle resolved less than happily when Kane laments the loss of her text, "borrowed" over her objections and never returned by her employer: That was one of the most upsetting experiences I've had. That book was so valuable to me. I wanted my children to read itv . It was a history I would like to have kept" (231). "Precious" because it is the product of her own creativity, this "little book" is "valuable" as well as a "history" its author intended to pass down from generation to generation.^[10]

Like Nell Kane's recollections, contemporary black women's culinary narratives clarify the larger cultural contest that underlies, for instance, the exchange of—or struggle over—a recipe. Books like Princess Pamela's Soul Kitchen , Helen Mendes's African Heritage Cookbook , Edna Lewis's The Ebony Cookbook , and Smart-Grosvenor's own Vibration Cooking celebrating "Afro-American cookery" (xviii) were published within the Black Arts Movement of the mid to late 1960s, a discursive context that takes for granted the need to formulate a separatist aesthetic and in which the development of an explicitly political art is mandated rather than censured. Whereas Cleofas Jaramillo has little precedent in establishing a Sociedad Folklórica that excludes nonnatives^[11] and Fabiola Cabeza de Baca insists only obliquely on maintaining cultural proprietorship, Smart-Grosvenor's homage to "'Afro-American' cookery" (xx) and Jessica Harris's Afrocentric guide to black American cooking are authorized by a well-established critical apparatus, a movement that has critiqued Martin Luther King Jr.'s advocacy of civil rights as "pandering to the fears and anxieties of the white middle class in the attempt to earn its 'goodwill'" (the words of Stokely Carmichael),^[12] a movement that has watched the Black Panthers on national television and listened to Malcolm X in the streets, a movement that by the late 1960s had produced literary anthologies with names like Black Fire and volumes of poetry entitled Think Black, Black Pride , and Black Boogaloo: Notes on Black Liberation .^[13]

"Things African have gained a new respect among black Americans," Houston Baker wrote in Black Literature in America (1971), one year after the publication of Vibration Cooking : "The writers of the twentiesv . were interested in shedding their chrysalises in order to merge into the mainstream of American life. Today's writers, however, are engaged in an attempt to construct a chrysalis of blackness, a distinctive covering which will set them apart and enable them to grasp the essence of the black American's reality."^[14] Beginning as early as Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1947) and flourishing throughout the 1960s and early 1970S in books like James Baldwin's Shadow and Act (1955) and The Fire Next Time (1962) and Leroi Jones's Blues People (1963), recirculated in essays by James Stewart, James Boggs, and Larry Neal, reproduced in the critical literature two decades later with the publication of Houston Baker's important Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (1984), this aesthetic, for black men, at least, is best represented by music—most often, the blues.^[15]

"Our music has always been the most dominant manifestation of what we are and feel," Neal writes in his "Afterword" to the anthology Black Fire , "The best of it has always operated at the core of our lives, forcing itself upon us as in a ritual."^[16] So too Jones, although he later retracts this judgment, honors the vernacular, oral rhythms of the blues as the "essence of the black American's reality": "Blues and jazz have been the only consistent exhibitors of 'Negritude' in formal American culture simply because the bearers of its tradition maintained their essential identities as Negroes."^[17]

Culinary Transnationalism: Jessica Harris's Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons

If the music these writers and critics are listening to is performed as often by Billie Holiday as by John Lee Hooker, the literary and critical paean to it remains, as I have glanced at above, a formulation more often written in a masculine than a feminine hand. For women, by contrast, the "chrysalis of blackness"—or, to reframe Baker's statement, the affirmation of race in and through literature post-Brown vs. Board of Education—seems concentrated elsewhere. Once again, VertaMae Smart-Grosvenor provides a starting point when she comments, if obliquely, on the gendered inequity in representations of Black Art:

When Vibration Cooking came out in 1970, there were fewer than ten published cookbooks by Afro-Americans. There are not many more than that today. That's a scandalv . There should be a hundred more books on the subject. Afro-American cookery is like jazz—a genuine art form that deserves serious scholarship and more than a little space on the bookshelves. (xviii)

Jessica Harris's 1989 Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons is one such cookbook to have been produced since Smart-Grosvenor published her 1986 "Introduction" to Vibration Cooking ; it is a coda to "The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl," which provides readers with an argument about the formation and maintenance of African American cultural practice. Harris gives her book a format that emphasizes the similarities in food preparation across three continents in order to create a community that gains its authority not from rootedness, as I have argued about culinary autobiography by Hispanas, but from the experience of dislocation: "In truth, and in more ways than one, African

cooking on the continent and in the New World can be summed up in one sentence: Same Boat, Different Stops" (xx).

As the historical focal point for this culinary autoethnographic narrative, the Atlantic slave trade provides Harris with a way to acknowledge oppression, not in order to bemoan the fate of the scattered survivors but, rather, to recuperate a notion of agency on behalf of her self and her people. Harris's retelling of the "largest forced migration in the history of mankind" enables her to develop a concept of cross-cultural contact that deemphasizes the capitulation of a subordinate to a dominant group in order to stress the ways in which, as Hertha Wong has indicated of Plains Indians pictography, "two cultures influence one another simultaneously."^[18]

Granted, Harris describes cooking and culture within a colonial power structure. Consider the following phrase, where parallel syntax reinforces the sameness of oppressive circumstances across different countries: "In the Tara-like Casas Grandes of Brazil, the Great Houses of the Caribbean, and the antebellum mansions of the American South, black hands have turned wooden spoons in heavy cast-iron pots for centuries" (xv–xvi). The dreary consistency of exploitation, however, only makes the author's insistence on the cultural balance of power existing between slaves and slave-holders a more striking instance of the degree to which authority can be maintained under the most oppressive circumstances:

Reports of foods eaten during the slave centuries indicate that though planters may have attempted to reproduce the cuisine of their mother country on the other side of the Atlantic, a transformation was taking place. In African hands, the recipes were being changed according to local ingredients and African culinary techniques. . . . In time, their taste would win out over much of the South in what [Eugene] Genovese calls "the culinary despotism of the quarters over the Big House." (xvi–xvii)

The "culinary despotism" Genovese attributes to slave cultures is perhaps more easily discernible by the hindsight of history. Nevertheless, such attention to the cultural innovations of a population subject to the severest political and economic exploitation does reclaim agency. And, as I have noted above, its implications for refining theories that describe the politics of cross-cultural contact are significant, for it provides us with an alternative to what Arnold Krupat calls "dichotomous logic . . . inadequate to the actual complexities of cultural encounter in history."^[19] The structural logic

of Harris's book, in which a recipe for grits from the American South follows directions for preparing cornmeal mash from Barbados, reflects at the same time the geographical dislocations of the diaspora and its often productive cultural results. By providing different recipes with her autobiographical ground as a point of origin, Harris can reproduce recipes from places as distinct as Antigua, Togo, and Martinique and yet emphasize the cultural parallels across borders. Her depiction of culinary cross-pollination thus directs us to see, as culture critic Kobena Mercer has argued about black aesthetics, that "what has taken place between the dominant (white) cultures and people of African descent . . . is a kind of mutual appropriation of artistic styles rather than a narrowly defined, blind imitation of white, Eurocentric standards."^[20]

Yet the ethnographic assertion Harris develops in her intercontinental cookbook is articulated through an autobiographical narrative: the recollection of one individual's journey re-collects as well those descendants of Africans who are now divided geographically. If her travels as a tourist inevitably locate her in the position of cultural Other and so threaten to place her in the decontextualized space a food writer like M. F. K. Fisher occupies, the familial reminiscences Harris intersperses between recipes return her to history and to "home."

Adapting a technique not unlike the weave of historical, familial, and personal narratives in N. Scott Momaday's automythography The Way to Rainy Mountain ,^[21] Harris uses her own journey to recover a sense of tribal history as a structural and thematic parallel to the journey of the slaves through the Middle Passage. Situating herself as "the most recent link in the chain, bringing international inspiration and a sense of history" (xxii), the author's collecting of recipes works to authorize African American culture. "I hope that this book will fix the taste of combread, beans, collard greens, okra, chiles, molasses, and rum on our tongues for generations to come," she comments in her Introduction (xxii). Negotiating between personal travels and historical voyage, to a description of the Middle Passage she appends an autobiographical statement which asserts community simultaneously with the self:

Traditional foods trace a gossamer thin line as far back as I can remember or discover in my family. It is a tradition that I maintain and will pass on. Grandma Jones's banana fritters—born of the necessity of feeding a family of twelve during the Depression—cut the bad spots off the overripe bananas

that no one wants and make fritters—have become a food that I now crave. (xx)

Significantly, the play of autobiographic and ethnographic discourses is predicated upon a maternal authority. Recollections of "Grandma Jones's" and "Grandma Harris's" cooking along with her own mother's dinners establish the narrator's autobiographical presence, locating her on a culinary family tree. "Fate has placed me at the juncture of two Black culinary traditions," she writes, "that of the Big House and that of the rural South" (xxi). Describing family reunions with a material plenitude of "groaning boards, of 'put up' preserved peaches, seckle pears, and watermelon rinds" (xxii), Harris evokes a sense of full family life, of the close ties which in turn produce the narrator herself.

Yet these childhood memories also gender culinary and cultural traditions. "Grandma Harris insisted on fresh produce," the author writes, "and some of my early memories are of her gardening in a small plot where she lived, tending foods that I would later come to know as African: okra, collard greens, black-eyed peas, and peanuts" (xxii). Harris thus suggests that her sense of ethnic identity is the product of conscious feminine labor, the result of Grandma Harris's careful tending of her garden. The maintenance of culture requires work, the author insists, and this responsibility is typically a female duty. The "heavy black cast-iron pots, caldrons, and skillets" which "are a leitmotif of Black cooking" (xxi) in Brazil, in Nigeria, in Barbados, in the United States, are typically the mother's gift to the daughter, and her own legacy is no exception: "My paternal grandmother, Grandma Harris, presented my mother with a caldron and skillet when she got married. These utensils, though at first disdained, have done over half a century's yeoman's duty in our kitchen. One day they will be mine" (xxi).

Peach Ice Cream and Plum Lightning Wine: History and Nostalgia in Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine

Its titular invocation of those homely substances "iron" and "wood" celebrating a distinctly working-class practice, Jessica Harris's Afrocentric narrative situates itself within the wake of the Black Arts Movement of two

decades earlier. By contrast, Norma Jean and Carole Darden's Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine , although published in 1976, suggests an effort to escape the political momentum of this movement. On the cover, in a photograph colored cool rose and mint green, the two authors smile out at the reader. Their white smocks, straw hat, and patterned aprons do not invoke the iconography of the kaleidoscopic and relentlessly urban 1960s, but that of a rural, pre-war America holding the promise, through this backward glance, of abundance and tranquillity. Nor does the racially inflected reader-response of 1960s criticism get reinstated in this text. Smart-Grosvenor warns, "In Vibration Cooking I have told all I'm going to tell" (xx), to set limits on the voyeuristic demands of non-black readers, but, as the cover commentary from the New York Post advertises, the Dardens' book appears to invite everyone to share in their "lovingly compiled scrapbook v of recipes, memories, and family history."

The book's contents do not disappoint those nostalgic for a more ordered life. Delicate etchings of fruit and flowers alternate with sketches of turn-of-the-century bowler hats and upright pianos as recipe dividers, while the photos that accompany these "reminiscences and priceless family lore" (back cover) show a handsome, middle-class family, its members, to a person, displaying that quiet uprightness of bearing which promises not so much defiance as resolution in the face of obstacles. The recipes themselves, for such studiedly old-fashioned foods as hand-churned peach ice cream and homemade "plum lightening wine" further this illusion of grace under pressure.

Black critics and writers contemporaneous with its publication would likely accord the Dardens' rose-colored tributes to a genteel past about as much praise as they give to civil rights workers who "pander v to the fears and anxieties of the white middle class in the attempt to earn its 'goodwill.'" Nor would a great many contemporary readers shower it with accolades for its stubborn insistence on protecting the familial and personal past from violence. Consider, for instance, how little the final photograph of the Dardens' text, captioned "The Sampsons picnicking at roadside," reveals to readers unfamiliar with the context of black American history. The family look untroubled as they bow their heads over the laden table as if in thanksgiving for its abundance, and the table itself, stretching almost the length of the frame, refuses admittance to any disruption of its plenty. Yet, as Mamie Garvin Fields's granddaughter Karen acknowledges

in her preface to Lemon Swamp , such open-air festivities were in actuality as often motivated by fears of racist harassment as by a desire to enjoy food en plein air . Remembering her own family's annual excursions across the Mason-Dixon line, Karen Fields's narrative provides readers with an alternate, historically coded figuration of the Dardens' laden table:

The drive to South Carolina allowed us a transition from our own country to that one. My father always saw to it that we carried huge provisions—fried chicken, potato salad, roast ham, buttered bread, unbuttered bread, big Thermos jugs filled with lemonade, and anything else we could possibly want to eat or drink. We even carried bottles filled with plain water and a special container just for ice. As far as possible, the family car was to be self-sufficient. We carried detailed maps for the same reason that we carried so much food and drink: a determination to avoid insult, or worse.^[22]

Yet if Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine is determinedly nostalgic and relentlessly backwards-looking, it does not obliterate history but, rather, substitutes for recent events an earlier series of chronotypes. The familial "seat" described in the opening pages of their recollections may advance their grandfather to the status of unofficial town ruler, but if the Dardens are intent on providing their own middle-class status with an historical precedent, they are equally interested in providing ignorant readers with lessons in nineteenth-century American history more generally. In the middle 1870s, Wilson was a "small, slow-paced, rather quiet tobacco town with about 4,000 citizens, 40 percent of whom were black, so things looked encouraging for black political progress," they write. "But by 1875, Reconstruction had given way to terrorism. In Wilson as well as the rest of the South, the Ku Klux Klan had spread its sheets. Voting was over" (17). In the context of this nineteenth-century terror, Charles Henry Darden signifies black resistance: "He was convinced that economic self-reliance now held the key to the survival of the black community" (17), the authors argue, coding their narrative as a rereading of the nineteenth-century goals of racial uplift and Washingtonian self-reliance.^[23]

Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine , then, provides readers with an alternative model for a race-inflected authority. And a gendered authority as well: the celebration of maternal power which in Jessica Harris's book remains the constant amidst geographical change is characteristic of Norma Jean and Carole Darden's culinary reminiscences too. As in Iron Pots and

Wooden Spoons , in the Dardens' book the close relation between the struggles of the family and the work of the writer is captured in the formal structure of the memoir. Biographical reminiscences introduce the recipes of each family member, the collection as a whole composing, as in Jessica Harris's book, a culinary family tree. In fact, it is in the act of (re)collection that the sisters locate their autobiographical subject. Writing the cookbook was motivated by a desire to "strengthen family ties, and [to] learn more about our ancestors' history and tradition" (10). In so doing, the authors deliver "a testimonial to those who lovingly fed us" and simultaneously provide themselves with "a better sense of ourselves" (11).^[24] Consistent with this jointly authored text's tribute to a familial collective, most of the confessional moments here are not so much produced by the sisters as reproduced by them. There are few memories intimately connected to the authorial "we," more that provide representations of family members, recollections which distill for us a sense of "character"—the loving reassurances of Uncle John to his fiancée Jean before their wedding day, for instance, or Uncle Clyde's insistence on maintaining control over his own narrative sketch and his resistance to the sisters' efforts to draw him out.

Sisterly portraiture in Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine , then, does not so much recall the constantiy developing identity of Jessica Harris's travelogue as remain fixed in a likeness of childhood. The celebration of maternal authority with which the authors preface their recipes reflects such a notion of the self as graspable through a series of quintessential, unchanging characteristics. The authors recall watching their female relatives "as they moved about in their kitchens v preparing meals. Each one worked in a distinct rhythm, and from the essence of who they were came unique culinary expressions" (9). The "essence" of each individual, readers learn, can be apprehended by the collection of recipes that represent them: enterprising Papa Darden is well regarded for the strawberry, blackberry, and dandelion wines he concocted annually and sold in his store, but which he never drank himself, while sentimental Aunt Maude, "a great believer in the power and joy of love" (55), is known for her caramel kisses and candied rose petals. Like Maya Angelou's parallel between cuisine and culture in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings ("Through food we learned that there were other people in the world" [175]), representation in the Dardens' text is synecdochic rather than metonymic. These are culinary snapshots, with recipes providing an almost one-to-one index to personality.

As is consonant with the text's nineteenth-century historical focus, the autobiographical axis remains retrospective. Both the autobiographical interventions in the sketches of family members and the personal voice of the book's introduction recount memories from a fixed point of view in childhood. In their literary researches, the authors explain, "we encouraged people to talk about the times of their youth—their hopes, dreams, highs, lows, and of course thoughts on food" (10). The effect, like that of the sentimental memories of earlier days in Cleofas Jaramillo's and Fabiola Cabeza de Baca's work, is nostalgic. Like those passages in midcentury Hispana narrative where ethnographic studies of fading "custom" close with invocations to a cultural and/or familial community, such affiliating texts run the risk of dividing a past graspable only in memory from a sense of history as continuous, subject to the interventions of writing. What stops this reification of history as History is that it is spoken in the first person. Produced as autobiography, historical revision need not need have a termination point but can be reproduced and revised again in the present:

It is a simple act of thoughtfulness to the living, but it takes the form of a feast. Turkeys, hams, roasts, and casseroles are given, but as children, we had a natural interest in the sweets and hot breads that were offered, and to this day we find it particularly appropriate to take a cake, a pie, or bread to the family of the departed. (241)

Soul Food and Self-Provisioning: VertaMae Smart-Grosvenor's Vibration Cooking

Although it was first published in 1970, only eight years before Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine , VertaMae Smart-Grosvenor's Vibration Cooking: Or, The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl seems a half-century distant: irreverent where the Dardens are worshipful, exuberant where the Dardens are restrained, flippant where the sisters are in earnest, and—most important with respect to autobiography—elusive, presenting readers with a multiplicity of seemingly incompatible self-representations. To the extent that Smart-Grosvenor makes use of the metaphor of travel to describe a self in process, Vibration Cooking is reminiscent of Jessica Harris's Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons . And, as with Harris's book, the model of the self in Smart-Grosvenor's autobiography is historicized by being developed in the context of colonialism. In this passage invoking the Under-

ground Railroad, however, cooking is not so much the metonym enabling political critique as it is itself quite literally a political act:

Sometimes they would be in the middle of their dinner when the stops [homes that hid slaves en route to freedom] got word that a slave or slaves were coming through that night. They might even have some neighbors or even members of the family there who were not cool . . . so they had to have signals to let each other know that tonight it would happen. Uncle Costen said they had a special dish they would serve called "Harriet Tubman Ragout." (29)

While this description locates the resistance to slavery inside the homes of African Americans rather than in the offices of William Lloyd Garrison, it does not oversimplify the dynamics of intraracial relations in order to do so. Community here is not a function of race but an active political choice; the picture of familial harmony around the kitchen table is deceptive, the affirmation of African American solidarity only apparent. Those readers who insist on racial uniformity put themselves in the position of the hood-winked individuals of more than one race, who unsuspectingly help themselves to second portions of a ragout that is to the circle of politically minded diners a vehicle for more than corporeal support.

This commentary provides a much-needed revision of a history of slavery and slave insurrections that is all too often framed in the plodding critical terms of binary opposition—those who "resist" set against those who "accede" to oppression. It provides, as well, a critique of that very aesthetic apparatus, the Black Arts movement, to which Smart-Grosvenor's epigraph to Amiri Baraka suggests her narrative owes a substantial debt. With Hurstonian resistance to being catalogued, the critical "community" Vibration Cooking 's title advertises as its own is simultaneously welcomed and held at arm's length by Smart-Grosvenor. Just as her commentary on the history of slave resistance invokes a position only to keep to its margins, so her use of the artistic credos of Black Power acknowledges her reliance upon such formulations and yet keeps them at a critical remove. On the one hand, then, she carries out Stokely Carmichael's manifesto on maintaining culture ("The racial and cultural personality of the black community must be preserved and the community must win its freedom while preserving its cultural integrity")^[25] when she argues for a reappraisal of black English:

You know people got to dig that "nigger dialect" is really beautiful. The slaves were just adapting to a language that wasn't their own. They were from many tribes, and plus the masters didn't talk too tough themselves. So they took the English language and did what they could with it and it was beautiful. Black people are the only people in this country who speak English and make it sound musical. (67–68)

On the other hand, she glories in parodies of Geechee tall tales that are designed not only to hoodwink unsuspecting white folks (this being almost too easy) but also to mock the sometimes pompous, often humorless prose of "Negro artists" whose black-and-white cultural models cannot do justice to the ragged contours of real life.

The "real life" of Smart-Grosvenor's Travel Notes has more switchbacks than Black Arts Movement critic James Stewart's formulations can safely negotiate.^[26] "In Paris I used to eat what they called crepes," Smart-Grosvenor recalls. "They are very good but I don't make them . . . . Crepes are delicate to make and you have to have an expensive and fancy pan to make them. I prefer hoe cake of bread like Grandmama Sula used to make" (20). Like white bread with a French accent, the crepe, sniffs Smart-Grosvenor, is too high-toned for any hard-working black girl from South Carolina to enjoy properly. Smart-Grosvenor's prose may be sassier than Stewart's essay, but her argument reproduces his own aesthetic agenda: "The dilemma of the 'negro' artist is that he makes assumptions based on the wrong models. He makes assumptions based on white models. These assumptions are not only wrong, they are even antithetical to his existence. . . . Our models must be consistent with a black style, our natural aesthetic styles, and our moral and spiritual styles" (3). Only a chapter later, however, Smart-Grosvenor doubles back to insist that "Salade Niçoise is a French name but just like with anything else when soul folks get it they take it out into another thing" (62). Recalling a series of wily female predecessors, this kind of contretemps flies in the face of Stewart's insistence that "we must even, ultimately, be estranged from the dominant culture. . . . Our black artists v can not be 'successful' in any sense that has meaning in white critical evaluations" (6). Like the author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and her grandmother, who "use language as a weapon" to "suggest a feminine reflection of the trickster figure,"^[27] Smart-Grosvenor contravenes any attempt at systematizing and thus simplifying the complicated negotiations that make up both intra-and intercultural con-

tact or, as her chapter titles articulate this division, "Home" and "Away from Home."

Throughout her culinary travelogue, in fact, Smart-Grosvenor invokes truisms of race relations in order to suggest their ultimate unreliability as a gauge of her subjectivity. As a kind of trickster chef, she serves dishes that look like the genuine article but actually have unsuspecting readers consuming humble pie. The text begins as a cross between a Daniel Boone narrative of the Wild West—translated to the swamps of South Carolina as the story of "Birth, Hunting and Gator Tails"—and an account of miraculous birth reminiscent of Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road . Just as Hurston focused on the originality of her introduction to the world, with her mother assisted by a midwife who was not only white but male, in order to ensure her success as marked from the cradle, Smart-Grosvenor describes her own birth as a remarkable event, complete with fortuitous intercessor:

I was so weak they put me in a shoe box and put the box on the wood-stove oven door. That was a kind of incubator. My mother says it was a case of touch and go for a while, cause she got the childbirth fever. She said, "I'm sorry child you'll have to fend for yourself" and started to throw me in the fireplace but all praises due to the gods Aunt Rose caught me. When I go down south now they treat me so good, cause they know that I wasn't but three pounds when I was born. Everyone always says, "Well do Jesus. To think that you wasn't no bigger than a minute when you was born and now you six feet tall and strong and healthy and you got two fine children of your own. The Lord works in mysterious ways His praises to behold." (7–8)

From this singular beginning the author goes on to describe the equally unusual food she was raised on, more straightforward recipes for "Smothered Rabbit" and venison giving way to progressively campier concoctions like "Stewed Coon" and "Peacocks" (too beautiful to be eaten, the cook advises, in the event that a reader seriously considered the possibility), ending with a flourish of "African" standards like "Kangaroo Tail Stew" and "Elephant Tails" and the American version of them, "Betty's Barbecued Gator Tails." Even the most gullible of readers, one assumes, would find this culinary history of African American culture a trifle disingenuous, especially upon learning that the kangaroo tail must be obtained at the local gourmet food store. In case the more earnest fail to learn their les-

son such directives are followed by more explicit critiques which call attention to the tall tale the autobiographer plays out. Recalling a Thanksgiving spent in France, Smart-Grosvenor describes her search for "genuine" American food: "I ran around to find an exotic food store that sold American canned goods and finally found one near the Madeleine where I bought cranberry sauce and Maxwell House coffee" (59). The juxtaposition of the "exotic" with the mundane disappoints readers determined to find in "soul food" access to the cultural Other.

Placed in the context of the Black Arts Movement, Smart-Grosvenor's critique of (white) cultural voyeurism appears at once less startling—many of her contemporaries were writing to protest the commodification of African American culture—and more specifically coded as a gendered response, its argument and form invoking a feminine literary tradition. The flyleaf of the second edition of Vibration Cooking genders Smart-Grosvenor's argument from the outset; just as Janie ostensibly tells her story to Phoeby in Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God , VertaMae writes to Stella, framing her reevaluation of cooking with a traditionally feminine series of appeals. Smart-Grosvenor counsels Stella and, by implication, all her women readers, "If you cook with love and feed people, you got two forces cooled out already. . . . Food can cause happiness or unhappiness, health or sickness and make or break marriages." The beginning of the narrative proper genders such culinary labors even more clearly: "I like men who enjoy food," Smart-Grosvenor asserts in a pointed razzing of one of the tenets of late 1960s Anglo-American feminism. "Cooking for a man is a very feminine thing" (3). Marialisa Calta sees the recipes in Ntozake Shange's 1982 novel Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo as "a way to acknowledge all the time women spend cooking for and feeding other people" (time, Shange argues, that "'the world at large often doesn't see as significant'").^[28] Similarly, Smart-Grosvenor reevaluates cooking: if it is quotidian, it can also "make or break life."

Still, the immediate precursor to Smart-Grosvenor's book is unarguably Amiri Baraka's 1962 essay "Soul Food."^[29] Replaying Ellison's debt to Proustian memory ("I yam what I yam," the narrator of Invisible Man acknowledges, as the fragrance of roasting sweet potatoes recalls him to all of black Southern history), Baraka's sweet potato pies "taste . . . like memory." Anticipating Smart-Grosvenor's attention to the class inflections of the culinary metaphor, Baraka uses "collards and turnips and kale and

mustards" to critique the pretensions of the black bourgeoisie; since greens are "not fit for anybody but the woogies . . . they found a way to make them taste like something somebody would want to freeze and sell to a Negro going to Harvard as exotic European spinach" (86).

Thematically Smart-Grosvenor's riff on greens, as we see below, owes much to Baraka's, but its tone and form recall a distinguished series of female autobiographical precursors: canny like Harriet Jacobs, feisty as Harriet Wilson in Our Nig . But again it is Hurston as anthropologist and autobiographer that Vibration Cooking 's complicated, jokey self-situating most closely duplicates. Other Black Arts writers condemn not only whites, particularly those who Stokely Carmichael calls the "Pepsi generation" ("young middle-class Americans" who "have wanted to come alive through the black community"),^[30] but also blacks who have internalized the hegemonic standard. Larry Neal, for instance, indicts black literature for "providing exotic entertainment for white America" (650). But, like Baldwin's blues, "tart and ironic, authoritative and double-edged" (41–42), Smart-Grosvenor's assessments are self-conscious and street-smart, sharp-eyed hits that implicate herself, with Hurstonian bravura, as both buyer and seller of culture: "I exploit Afro-American dishes every chance I get . . . for instance, collard greens" (xv–xvi), she brags with a devil-may-care-but-all-the-time-looking-back-over-your-shoulder duplicity. Reliable narrator? Hardly. From the outset, Smart-Grosvenor represents herself as a trickster figure, pointing readers in one direction while she walks off in the other. Consider this grocery store exchange:

So there I was, in line, holding my collard greens. A white woman asked me, "How do you people fix these?" Now, more than likely if I had not been in such a Purple Funk, I might have let the "you people" go by, but this particular morning I didn't. "Salad," I said. . . . I have often wondered if that white woman went home and actually made a collard green salad with Italian dressing. (xvi)

Like Cabeza de Baca's emphasis on the impossibility of complete translation, Smart-Grosvenor's willful mistranslation provides a check on readers—at least white readers—eager to make African American culture their own. As a comment on the pitfalls of cross-cultural exchange, the story provides a gloss on the book itself, suggesting that cooks think twice before reproducing its recipes.

There are other cautionary tales. Take the coda to the story of how hush puppies got their name, for instance: "You can believe this," she says, "if you believe all the other American folk tales" (94). Besides providing the writer with a degree of interpretive control, such tongue-in-cheek gestures at the expense of the credulous also affirm black pride as they critique the paucity of white culture. The word-play in recipes for "Steak with Beautiful Black Sauce" and "Stuffed Heart Honky Style" (114, 115) requires no further commentary. While African American tradition is celebrated via culinary custom, Anglo-American culture is denounced through its edibles as a contradiction in terms. The directions for "Cracker Stew" advise cooks to "take a can of any kind of soup and add 1 box of any kind of frozen vegetables and then add 1 cup of Minute Rice. Heat and serve with toasted crackers on top" (79). The implicit contrast drawn between Anglo cultural poverty and the richness of African American life is later made explicit when Smart-Grosvenor describes the dinner preparations of a white colleague in the theater. "No smells of food cooking or having been cooked" (101) issue from the kitchen. The meal, when it arrives, is prepackaged: frozen peas, instant potatoes, canned chicken. Returning to her own kitchen, the author promptly "fried a piece of liver and put on a little bit of grits and in a short time I had an epicurean delight" (102). Echoing analyses by Killen, who characterizes white culture as the "pallid mainstream of American life," and Addison Gayle, who critiques gringo "cultural deprivation,"^[31] the Anglo-American cultural repast, according to Smart-Grosvenor, is scant: show without substance, containing little real nourishment—let alone flavor.^[32]

While such indictments provide readers with an appreciation of the fullness of Afro-American tradition, they tend to a certain extent to occlude the autobiographical subject herself. That is, although such anecdotes are often framed as personal narrative, the cross-cultural comparison they develop positions the subject as an ethnographic "we," a collective identity rigidly framed in opposition to "them." Consider, for instance, how the following critique of "white bread culture" positions pronouns, constructing an "I" contingent upon its affiliation with an aggregate that is unable to accommodate difference: "You white folks just keep on eating that white foam rubber bread that sticks to the roof of your mouth, and keep on eating Minute Rice and instant potatoes, instant cereals and drinking instant milk and stick to your instant culture. And I will stick to

the short-lived fad that brought my ancestors through four hundred years of oppression" (l77).^[33]

The "I" who eloquently protests racism and affirms African American survival expresses herself as a spokesperson more than she asserts singularity here. Yet at the opening of the text Smart-Grosvenor as vigorously affirms her specificity as a black woman writer who can maintain a cultural vision while she simultaneously practices cultural pluralism. She refuses to fix her identity as a "soul food" writer:

It seemed to me while certain foods have been labelled "soul food" and associated with Afro-Americans, Afro-Americans could be associated with all foods. . . . My kitchen was the world. . . . I don't have culinary limitations because I'm "black." On the other hand, I choose to write about "Afro-American" cookery because I'm "black" and know the wonderful, fascinating culinary history there is. (xv)

Unlike the concordance of autobiographic and ethnographic discourses which in Jessica Harris's Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons and the Darden sisters' Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine situates the subject in cultural context, in VertaMae Smart-Grosvenor's Vibration Cooking the languages of self and culture often appear at odds: contradictory, discontinuous, working against one another. Impulses toward black collectivity counterpoint an emphasis—reminiscent of that in Hurston's autobiography—on the miracle of the self's uniqueness. Yet this self-assertion is itself abruptly exchanged for an affirmation of "my people."

On the one hand, then, Smart-Grosvenor uses role-playing to insist on identity as multiple and contingent upon circumstance. "In Vibration Cooking I have told all I'm going to tell" (xx), she announces in the book's introduction, distinguishing between the narrative's "I" and the identity of the author who has produced the book. On the other hand, in a statement reminiscent of Jessica Harris's tribute in Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons , she uses the trope of culinary succession to suggest an identity fixed as woman-centered. "Throw out all of [the cooking pots] except the black ones" she advises. "The cast-iron ones like your mother used to use" (2). By dedicating the book to "my mama and my grandmothers and my sisters in appreciation of the years that they worked in miss ann's kitchen and then came home to TCB in spite of slavery and oppression and the moynihan report," she establishes gender as a central factor in her self-concep-

tion one that provides the book's multiple self-representations with a single reference point.

Smart-Grosvenor uses a variety of languages in this book in order to emphasize the shifting and multiple nature of self-representation and to document the historical struggles that have contributed to its formation. Lack of discursive harmony need not be read as a structural weakness, however. What enables the smoothly modulated articulation of both Harris's and the Darden sisters' culinary autobiographies, after all, is a conception of the subject as essentially fixed. Norma Jean and Carole Darden locate the first-person plural in childhood; Jessica Harris explores the development of an adult "I" through the detached observations of the tourist. Smart-Grosvenor's speaking voice, in contrast, does not remain rooted at any one vantage point. Travel produces neither an "I" emphatically rooted at home nor a subject whose visits to foreign places wholly defy efforts at self-situating; instead, it suggests the contingency of identity.

On the level of the (culinary) signifier, Smart-Grosvenor expresses this doubled vision in explaining her appearance on an ethnic cooking series: "I wanted to use the opportunity to prove that Afro-American cookery was more than chitlins and pigs' feet, and at the same time I wanted to acknowledge the traditional dishes" (xvi–xvii). The author also articulates the problematics of autoethnography more directly. In fact, the difficulty involved in affirming culture without being perceived as its one-dimensional emissary occupies the autobiographer throughout her narrative. In "The Demystification of Food," she addresses the problem by presenting two alternative selves. The first is celebrative, sentimental, nostalgic. Recalling past New Year's Day parties with friends, she exclaims:

What times! Times, oh, times! I often get nostalgia for the old days and old friends. Like those New Year's open houses I used to have and everyone I loved would come. Even Millie came from Germany one year. She arrived just in time for the black-eyes and rice. (3)

But the reader's understanding is promptly undercut:

And that year I cooked the peas with beef neck bones instead of swine cause so many brothers and sisters have given up swine. . . . You supposed to cook the whole hog head but I couldn't. I saw it hanging in the butcher store on Avenue D and I didn't dig it. I left the swine hanging right where he was. (3)

In this attention-getting shift, the first-person pronoun insists on self-determination. Here the idiosyncratic is affirmed; difference, not similarity, finally constitutes the "plot" of the passage.

This tactic—describing expected behavior only to flout expectation—is the rule rather than the exception in this narrative. I argued earlier that Smart-Grosvenor often presents herself in a manner reminiscent of Hurston's capricious narrators, and I would suggest that such teasing shifts in self-representation provide for both writers a means of circumventing readers' attempts to fix the speaker as an ethnic "type." Both Hurston and Smart-Grosvenor indict such type-casting, using their emphatically eccentric self-imaging as a means of insisting on their own agency. Constructing an ethnic identity is a difficult maneuver; it requires careful negotiation between the demands of cultural affirmation on the one hand and the requirements of self-determination on the other. And, like Hurston, Smart-Grosvenor does not disdain acclaim for her technical facility. Rather, she delights in the performance.

In "Home," the first section of Smart-Grosvenor's book, readers are treated to a particularly eye-catching display of autobiographical gymnastics when the author describes her brief stint in England as "Princess Verta from Tabanguila, an island near Madagascar" (26). As an African princess the author enjoys the attention of the Dover Press, who publish an account of her interview as "Princess Verta Studies Our Way of Life" (27). The 1970S equivalent of in-your-face attitude, this eye-catching posturing flouts racism's invisibility syndrome, what James Baldwin describes as, "Black people, mainly, look down or look up but do not look at each other, not at you, and white people, mainly, look away" (30). Besides critiquing racist type-casting through parody, this literary disguise acknowledges the complicated nature of cultural representation by playing upon the series of self/other oppositions any autobiographical description creates. As ethnographic investigator, Princess Verta is Other, not only with respect to her English "audience" but with reference to "Home" and readers as well. (Note, however, that the author insists on her subjectivity by placing herself in the position of actor: Princess Verta examines her audience; they do not study her.) In counterpoint to later chapters of Vibration Cooking that situate Smart-Grosvenor's "I" within a cultural community, this portion of the text acknowledges the divisive mechanics of ethnographic description. The admission of complicity in this land of type-casting ("A lot

of people like to say they are the descendants of African chiefs. I have been through that stage" [26]) checks complacent readers by suggesting that such eccentric behavior is itself "typical." Yet the confession also maintains Smart-Grosvenor's difference; the act of telling is itself an idiosyncratic maneuver that acknowledges, even as it critiques, the Afrocentrism of the Black Arts movement.

I would like to look closely at another passage that uses role-playing to call attention to the dynamics of self-representation. Aspiring to become an actress, the author initially settles for working as a cook for the Hedgerow Theatre. She mocks her efforts to fashion a self that is independent of the tyrannical structuring principles of race, class, and gender:

I used to get the Chester bus to Rose Valley from Media and it was only full of black women who worked out there. They couldn't figure how come I was wearing jeans and sweaters to work. In my most Chekhovian voice I would say, "I'm an actress, not a domestic. I'm on my way to the theatre." They would look at me like I was out of my mind. One day I got on and the driver said, "Too hot to scrub floors today, right sweetie?" (98–99)

This stereotyping becomes literalized further on. Her first "big chance" (99) at acting comes in A Streetcar Named Desire . She is not to play Blanche, however, but one of the women who observes this grande dame from her doorstep. Mocking at once her own idealism, the naïveté of her readers, and the closemindedness of the theater crew, she continues:

I had one line. "Dis is it, honey-o" or something like that. . . . I was a nervous wreck. Maybe they wouldn't like my projection. Maybe they wouldn't like my delivery. Maybe they wouldn't like my technique. Maybe they wouldn't like me. But they didn't pay me no mind. My little part was so insignificant. (99–100)

In a coup reminiscent of Hurston and the Brer Rabbit stories of African American folklore, it is the "lady on the stoop" (99) who enjoys the last laugh. By the end of the week she has caused a scandal:

Everyone had warned me what a bitch Diana Barrymore was, but she was the only person I talked to during the whole week I was there. As a matter of fact, we became friends. We talked about voodoo and vibrations and stuff like that. The scandal I caused was because some apprentice said he saw me in my dressing room on my hands and knees talking in unknown tongues. It

was a lie. I was on the floor looking for my shoes and cussing to myself. See, that's what I mean, white and black folks speak a different tongue. (100)

I have quoted this passage at some length because it so aptly illustrates the interplay of autobiographic and ethnographic discourses in the text, those "different tongues" Smart-Grosvenor speaks to forestall readers from reducing a complicated subject to a one-dimensional silhouette. Consider, for instance, the abrupt shift in posture from the self-castigating sarcasm of "My little part" to the subdued triumph the actress enjoys in her more significant role as friend to Diana Barrymore. The disjunction in self-representation is striking: from anxiety and belittlement as she labors over her part only to discover its complete "insignificance," to satisfaction at creating a performance that turns heads throughout the theater, if only backstage. Seizing the limelight, the author enjoys undeniable social prestige in a gratifying reversal of power over members of the cast who previously had found her too unimportant to acknowledge.

More significantly, however, it allows her to assert interpretive authority over readers who, like the audience of actors and theatergoers at the Hedgerow, are in a position to "pay no mind" to her literary performance in Vibration Cooking . Just as she takes the upper hand with Diana Barrymore—with respect to "voodoo and vibrations" the starring actress plays apprentice to the apparently more authoritative Smart-Grosvenor—so she advances upon the interpretive domain of readers by creating a situation of sufficient ambiguity to cause them to question their own proficiency at reading. "Home remedies" given earlier, such as, for a nosebleed, "Catch the blood on a piece of brown paper and burn the paper" (138), constitute a sympathetic-medicine practice not dissimilar to "voodoo and vibrations and stuff like that." Voodoo further resonates with Baraka's 1969 Black Magic and recalls Larry Neal's edict in Black Fire that the black writer must be a "magician, working juju with the word" (655).^[34] The disjunction between mundane actuality (looking for shoes) and exotic fantasy (speaking in tongues) needles readers with a penchant for primitivism, but it nevertheless calls attention to a race-inflected reading of a different order. To the apprentice (and to those unwilling to allow for a more generous reading of the subject as a black woman), she is in fact speaking in an unknown tongue.

Smart-Grosvenor's dramatic costume changes demonstrate that it is racism that produces, if only momentarily, a fixed identity. Stepping onto a bus after the driver has put up prolonged resistance ("Who do you people think you are?" he asks rhetorically), she responds: "We are" (89). The struggle for existence robs the "I" of singularity: faced with a hostile "them," eccentric individuality is exchanged for the security of a common "we." If it is generated in response to oppression, however, this means of grounding the subject is nevertheless framed in the affirmative. A cousin living in the West Indies provides the author with recipes for sweet potatoes and a tribute to Ellison: "Did you know there are all kinds of yams? These are only a few. There are many different types here. . . . Then there is a yam called nigger yam. I won't even deal with that because after all a yam is a yam is a yam" (46). An accusation that she is "misrepresenting" herself as African because she wears the clothes of her ancestors prompts another affirmation of the essential rootedness of the "I" who can dress up as Princess Verta and down as the woman on the stoop:

Now I have done a lot of research on food and found out that Long Island ducks are not from Long Island at all. They are the descendants of ducks imported from Peking around 1870. . . . Potatoes are native to South America and were taken to Europe by the Spanish explorers "when they discovered South America." . . . Now, if a squash and a potato and a duck and a pepper can grow and look like their ancestors, I know damn well that I can walk around dressed like mine. (120)

The acknowledgment that oppression checks self-assertion could potentially undercut the confidence with which Smart-Grosvenor insists she is free to define herself. Yet the down-to-earth quality she evokes here domesticates this scene and deprives it of the power to terrorize. Through culinary comedy, assault becomes the vehicle for a quite unforgettable kind of self-affirmation.

Culinary Labor, Cultural Work, and the Autobiographical Subject

Ethnicity is not something that is simply passed on from generation to generation, taught and learned. . . . Insofar as ethnicity is a deeply rooted emotional component of identity, it is often transmitted less through cognitive language or learning . . .  than

through a process analogous to the dreaming and transference of psychoanalytic encounters .
Michael M. J. Fischer, "Ethnicity and the Arts of Memory," in James Clifford and George E. Marcus, Writing Culture

So, you see, this book is the reflection of our pilgrimage "home," which revealed to us not only good food but the origins, early struggles, and life-styles of our family  . . .  it is therefore a testimonial to those who lovingly fed us and at the same time gave us a better sense of ourselves by sharing themselves .
Norma Jean and Carole Darden, Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine

Certainly the development of ethnic identity, as anthropologist Michael Fischer suggests, is neither simple nor straightforward.^[35] The autobiographers of the culinary memoirs I have discussed in this chapter, however, despite their ideological, thematic, and formal differences, all share a strong sense of the conscious and careful rhetorical work that is needed if they are to reproduce cultural practices while at the same time asserting their own authority. They expend a great deal of narrative energy in order to affirm that the cultural work their female predecessors have undertaken is a difficult labor. In this sense, the disdained but serviceable "caldron and skillet" passed down from mother to daughter in Jessica Harris's Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons provides an appropriate metaphor for ethnic autobiography by women more generally. If they are humble, they are nevertheless instrumental in providing (material) nourishment, just as women autobiographers describe the mundane work of women, pointing to the common labors of their grandmothers, mothers, and daughters as ultimately the most significant in providing the emotional and spiritual sustenance necessary for self-assertion. Merely because it is conscious does not, after all, ensure that a labor is uncomplicated—if that were the case, civil rights struggles would have been resolved before now.^[36]

This insistence on the conscious labor involved in the reproduction of cultural practice provides, I would suggest, a means of affirming the work of female antecedents who often are given little attention in texts by male autobiographers. Hence the choice of gender-inflected metaphors of cultural practice and its maintenance: the culinary metaphor, distinctly femi-

nine and the reproductive model of cultural development and identity, specifically maternal. Such a recuperation of a female legacy of course enables women's textual self-assertion at the same time as it celebrates the lives of women family members as role models. The eulogy Norma Jean and Carole Darden provide for their grandmother Dianah Scarborough Darden, for instance, implicitly stresses the self-assurance of the authors as it affirms their grandmother's strength of character: "She was not one to merely accept second-class citizenship, and instilled in each child what was then called 'race pride;' insisting that they hold their heads high and assert their equality before God and among men" (28).

But there is a second, equally important reason impelling women writers to represent the relation between subjectivity and ethnicity as a conscious, practiced one. Over and over again, these authors emphasize the struggle that self-assertion demands, a struggle that is as much the task of family and community as of the subject herself. Using the metaphor of culinary labor to develop an ethnic identity thus associates endeavors in the cultural sphere with struggle in the political domain. In the sense that it replays political conflict as a struggle for cultural ownership, the autoethnographic discourse of Jaramillo's and Cabeza de Baca's culinary memoirs is characteristic of the personal narratives of American women of color more generally.

Cultural struggle, I would argue, is not incidental to political conflict but essential to it, the ideological signifier of shifts in political power, constituting itself, as John Brenkman asserts, "within and against the forms of domination that organize the society in which [it] is produced and the one in which it is received."^[37] It thus encompasses discourses of resistance as well as those languages of oppression that are used to justify the forcible possession of land and labor and to reconstruct the social monopoly as in the best interests of the cultural Others who provide the work necessary to accumulate such capital. Because it calls attention to the work involved in cultural reproduction, then, the culinary metaphor provides writers with a means of reexamining power. Figures like Eugene Genovese's "culinary despotism of the quarters" suggest that a kind of cultural authority may operate simultaneously with—and against—political sway. Such examinations of cultural work reconceptualize the fixed model of oppressor-oppressed power relations. Without sacrificing an acknowledgment of the physical and emotional burdens imposed by imperialism, these writers recuperate a sense of agency for people who in traditional political and literary theory have often been subjects in name only.