resignified and transformed to adapt to new market and cultural conditions. During the emergence and invention of Yucatecan gastronomy, Yucatecan cooks had developed the minor genre of inclusive, cosmopolitan-oriented cookbooks. Yet as the twentieth century moved forward, authors began to purge their cookbooks of recipes perceived to be alien to Yucatecan culinary forms. Yucatecan cookbook writers gradually abandoned recipes that were clearly attributable to Spanish, French, Italian, and other cultures, focusing instead on dishes that were, in due time, turned into iconic representatives of the regional gastronomic canon. This textual strategy promoted the identification of contemporary Yucatecan cuisine as different from other Mexican cuisines. The refinement of culinary practices eventually coalesced into a recognizable Yucatecan gastronomy.
The Culinary and Gastronomic Fields andthe Naturalization of Taste
What then is Yucatecan food? If it is what Yucatecans eat, what do Yucatecans eat? In general, most Yucatecans believe that anyone can easily distinguish between Yucatecan and other cuisines. Yucatecan cuisine embodies a recognizable aesthetic configuration of flavors, aromas, colors, and textures that are imagined to correspond to the cultural values shared by most people within the Yucatecan territory. Throughout the volume I will be discussing the part played by different elements in the ‘naturalization' of taste—that is, the institution of a predilection for the use of certain ingredients, combinations of ingredients (recipes), cooking techniques, and modes of food consumption that bracket their historical formation and allow Yucatecan people to recognize their preferences as a ‘natural' inclination for certain recipes and consumption techniques that set Yucatecan cuisine apart from other cuisines. Restaurants and cookbooks have been important vehicles in the dissemination of this aesthetic configuration and have contributed to the territorialization of Yucatecan taste.13 Cookbooks and restaurants combine their effects with those derived from (1) the oral transmission of recipes and kitchen secrets; (2) the historical expansion of the regional foodscape, a consequence of Yucatán's insertion in the global market; and (3) the practice of urban families to hire domestic cooks from rural villages (some of whom might be Maya speakers, while others could be impoverished peasants of diverse ethnic origins). Consequently, recipes, ingredients, and cooking techniques have traveled back and forth from cities to rural villages, creating the conditions for a regionally widespread appreciation of and inclination for the taste of Yucatecan foods.
It is now common knowledge that Yucatecan food typically does not include many milk products; that chili peppers are used to garnish meals, but foods are not cooked spicy hot; that pork and fowl are preferred over beef; that banana leaves are the element of choice to wrap foods before baking them in pit-holes; that Seville orange juice and lime juice are the standard marinating liquids; and that many of the spices and ingredients regularly used come from the Middle East via the Caribbean region. Also, very few Yucatecan recipes make use of tomato sauce to stew meats or vegetables (although fried or roasted tomato sauces can be used to garnish roasted, grilled, or baked meats), nor is sour cream used to cook meals. The combinations of ingredients peculiar to Yucatecan cooking allow regional dishes to be recognized by their aspect, aroma, texture, and distinctive flavors. There is also, in Yucatán, an established rhythm of food consumption, ingrained as part of the regional food culture, that contributes to the naturalization of taste. Yucatecans have adopted a weekly cycle of foods that integrates, repeats, and inscribes the preference for the use of certain ingredients and cooking techniques in local taste. Either domestic cooks or ‘economic kitchens'14 have assumed responsibility for reproducing this cycle of meals, making it almost ‘unnatural' to eat, for example, pork and beans on a day other than Monday, or puchero (stew) on any other day but Sunday. Restaurants often partake in this custom, making some dishes available as ‘specials' on the days of the week that Yucatecans expect to eat them.
However, it is also important to recognize that, whether one looks into the private or the public sphere, it is possible to find two interrelated and recognizable but distinguishable forms of Yucatecan cuisine. In this book I develop a distinction between what I call the culinary and the gastronomic fields. Since the nineteenth century, Yucatecans have appropriated culinary techniques, procedures, ingredients, and recipes originating in Europe and the Grand Caribbean region (encompassing the islands of the Caribbean Sea and its coastal areas, from Louisiana to the shores of Venezuela). Also, in their homes, domestic cooks appropriated and modified recipes from central Mexico and other Mexican regions to match local tastes. This variety of recipes was integrated into early cookbooks and in the domestic cooking of urban families, providing Yucatecans with a sense of cosmopolitanism. Hence, I conceptualize the culinary field as an open, inclusive field where recipes, ingredients, and cooking techniques and technologies from different cultural sources find acceptance, and where individuals find room for self-expression, creativity, and innovation in adapting those dishes to local taste. The analysis of the emergence and development of this field requires attention to processes of cultural exchange and hybridization, to global/local and minor translocal articulations, and to a variety of local understandings of the ‘modern'. The culinary field firmly establishes the Yucatecans' perception of themselves as cosmopolitan, progressive, and open to external influences.
At the time when Yucatecan domestic cooks were inventing the regional culinary field, some commercial cooks were given the opportunity to create and promote new foods, appropriating dishes from the Maya and peasant populations of the region, finding inspiration in recipes from other areas of the world, blending and adapting them to the locally available ingredients and to the taste of the region's middle and upper classes, and making them unique and specific to Yucatecan culture. Progressively, restaurateurs, with their customers' concurrence, have selected a number of dishes that have been turned into canonic and iconic representatives of Yucatecan cuisine, giving birth to what I conceptualize as the gastronomic field. Hence, in this book, I define the term ‘gastronomic field' as a socio-cultural arena in which individuals have developed explicit rules, norms, recipes, ingredients, techniques, and procedures for cooking (producing), and consuming food. My contention is that the Yucatecan gastronomic field is instituted through textual constructions, as promoted in cookbooks recognized as authoritative on Yucatecan gastronomy, and through the culinary practices performed in restaurants, where menus are seen as exemplary, pedagogical, and paradigmatic representations of Yucatecan gastronomy. Over time, Yucatecans have devised a quasi-formal set of rules that define which ingredients may or may not be allowed into the field, what combinations of ingredients or dishes in a meal are possible, the aesthetics of their presentation, and the etiquette for their consumption.15 These rules have been established through repetition and standardization, both in the content of cookbooks and in the lists of dishes presented in restaurant menus.
As I understand them, the culinary and gastronomic fields are intersecting spheres where individuals and groups engage in the textual and practical production and consumption of food. These fields are found in an immanent relation to each other. While arising from the Yucatecan culinary field, the gastronomic field is one that is restrictive, exclusive, and governed by explicit rules. It is one where writers, cooks, and consumers engage in a process of negotiation and purification whereby some elements are defined as proper or alien to Yucatecan ‘cultural traditions' and, consequently, are included or excluded from recipe collections and restaurant menus. In this context, while operating within the culinary field, agents stress their creativity and inventiveness in appropriating and devising new dishes. For them, their own creativity is based on their knowledge of diverse culinary sources. However, when performing within the gastronomic field, they declare it to be closed to external influences and affirm the exclusivity of its roots in the cultural values of Yucatecan society. It is here that we need to see that the constitution, institution, bifurcation, and relations between these fields are intersected by the post-national and post-colonial constructions of a regional identity that is opposed to central Mexican domination.
The gastronomic field disseminates its effects into the private domain. In the latter, domestic cooks see themselves (at times of heightened localism) as resisting the forces of Mexican or foreign cultural colonization and refuse to change their recipes. They assert a local gastronomic logic, claiming the authority to establish what can or cannot be admitted into—or recognized
