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.