Cooking Up the Nation: Spanish Culinary Texts and Culinary Nationalization in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century by Lara Anderson (review)

Lara Anderson’s Cooking up the Nation: Spanish Culinary Texts and Culinary Nationalization in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century analyzes the discourses involved in the culinary nationalization project in fin-de-siècle Spain. Central to this investigation are the tensions between preserving autochthonous Spanish dishes and modernizing Spanish cuisine through the incorporation of French recipes and customs. Also key to this discussion is the degree to which regional cuisines were included, without being subsumed, in the formation of a national culinary identity. Acknowledging the pivotal role of discourse in culinary nationalization, Anderson focuses on cookbooks by five fin-de-siècle Spanish authors: Dr. Thebussem and the King’s Chef, Ángel Muro Goiri, Emilia Pardo Bazán, and Post-Thebussem. Chapter one introduces the theoretical questions related to the creation of a national cuisine as well as the history of its emergence in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain. Anderson agrees with those scholars who argue that the creation of national culinary identities began in the nineteenth century, not the early modern period. Focusing on France, the pioneer in matters related to food, Anderson argues that despite efforts in the early modern period to record traditional recipes, French cookbooks produced at the time were essentially compendiums of court cuisine. It was not until after the French revolution, and the creation of print technology, that cookery books were written to appeal to a wider audience. This meant that culinary nationalization, even in France, did not truly emerge until the nineteenth century.

Turning the focus of the first chapter specifically to Spain, Anderson asserts that Spanish culinary nationalization emerged as a topic in the 1870s, at a time in which the Spanish elite -who remained the dominant class– consumed primarily French dishes. It was precisely the relative weakness of the Spanish middle class that explains Spain’s inability to revolutionize its cuisine by creating an autochthonous haute cuisine as had been done in France. Accepting the hegemony of French cuisine at the time as a cultural reality, Anderson seeks to correct Spanish culinary histories that have tended to disregard Spanish cookbook authors who continued to create works that included primarily French recipes. She argues that it is essential to give these works equal attention as they testify to middle- and upper-class Spaniards’ continued preference for French food as well as the tensions created by attempts to simultaneously preserve national traditions and to modernize. Nevertheless, Anderson does show how Spain’s culinary nationalization project deviated from that of France in its embrace of regional recipes. In other words, while Parisian food became synonymous with French food in France, in Spain regional diversity was embraced in Spanish cookbooks; Spaniards preferred to speak of national Spanish cuisines in the plural.

Dr. Thebussem and the King’s Chef’s La mesa moderna (1888) is the subject of chapter two. La mesa moderna was initially published as a series of 12 letters between Mariano Pardo de Figueroa, aka Dr. Thebussem (1828-1926), and José Castro y Serrano, aka Un Cocinero de Su Majestad (1829-1926) in La Ilustración Española y Americana. In these letters, they debate various issues related to Spanish cuisine. Dr. Thebussem generally champions Spanish cuisine and criticizes French influence, such as the fact that court menus were all written in French. The King’s chef, on the other hand, defends culinary modernity and French influence. This explains why Dr. Thebussem has been remembered as a culinary nationalist while the King’s Chef has not. Nevertheless, this overlooks the fact that both Dr. Thebussem and the King’s Chef were invented personae employed as a rhetorical strategy for exposing the differing views on the state of Spanish cuisine, and that, as the work progresses, they come closer together in their views. Furthermore, both of these authors concurred in their support of giving equal status...