@article{(1520-1750):4909,
      recid = {4909},
      author = {Gutierrez-Flores, Daniela},
      title = {Kitchen Selves: Cooks and the Literary Culture of the  Early Modern Spanish Atlantic (1520-1750)},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2022-08},
      pages = {242},
      abstract = {This dissertation examines the figure of the cook and  their role in the shaping of Spanish and Latin American  discourses of food preparation. Drawing on Iberian and  Latin American printed and archival sources from the  sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, this dissertation argues  that cooks fashioned their work as a socially useful,  politically relevant and culturally meaningful activity. By  analyzing how female and male cooks in the Spanish Atlantic  shaped the meanings and discourses of their work, it  demonstrates that the practice of cooking served as an  avenue to challenge social constraints, engage with  lettered culture, and shape new social identities and  communities. Chapter one discusses Mestre Robert’s Llibre  del coch, the first cookbook published in Spain. Through a  comparative analysis of the 1520 Catalan edition and the  1525 Castilian edition, I argue that the textual changes in  Llibre del coch are indicative of a reevaluation of  culinary knowledge, and, more generally, of cookery as a  virtuous occupation. Chapter two analyzes the figure of  pícaros de cocina and lowly kitchen workers in picaresque  narrative and archival sources. It focuses on Mateo  Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache and La vida y hechos de  Estebanillo González, as well as cookbooks and Royal Palace  records that detail the everyday life of royal kitchens.  Through the juxtaposition of these sources, this chapter  argues that pícaros are key figures to understand an  increasingly sharp division of labor and the emergent  professionalization of cooking. Chapter three studies the  spiritual diary of Úrsula de Jesús, a black religious  servant at the Convent of Saint Clare in Lima, Perú. This  chapter argues that, for Úrsula, cooking—a physically  exhausting practice embedded in the racial and social  division of the convent’s labor—constitutes an embodied  form of devotion. This chapter reveals the tensions between  doctrine and the everyday reality of religious life for  black women. The last chapter focuses on the life-writings  of Sor Marianita de San Joseph, a low-born white-veiled  Spanish nun who cooked at the convent of Saint Rose of  Lima, in Puebla, New Spain. It examines Marianita’s  representations of daily cooking in light of Dominican  female religious literature. This section argues that  Mariana’s cooking must be understood as a mode of  engagement with religious written culture, and thus a  practice that endowed those with little social leverage  with reputation and authority. Through the analysis of  these cooking subjects, this dissertation sheds light on a  cultural figure who, though pervasive today, has remained  largely invisible in the cultural imagination of the early  modern Spanish world due to the focus on foodstuffs that  has characterized the analysis of culinary cultures in the  region.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/4909},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.4909},
}