The gastronomic field is found in a paradoxical situation: although it tends to solidify over time, it simultaneously rests upon a social imaginary that places the emphasis on local/regional ingenuity, creativity, and innovation and on the artistic freedom of expression of locally rooted but cosmopolitan cooks.
Cod Biscayne-Style: Between the Yucatecan Culinaryand Gastronomic Fields
With the following account, I seek to illustrate how the culinary and gastronomic fields contribute to the naturalization of taste. While living in San Cristóbal de las Casas in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, we were once invited to stay at a friend's house a few days before the Christmas holiday. For this social gathering, our host announced that she had cooked a dish of cod Biscayne-style. In a paella pan she had fried a mixture of shredded cod with onions, tomato slices, almonds, olives, and spices. It was a flavorful, fried meal, with scant sauce. Cod Biscayne-style is one of the several ‘traditional' dishes that families choose to consume during the Christmas season all over the Mexican territory. In response to this custom, supermarkets import massive amounts of salted Norwegian cod. Although the flavors of my friend's dish were enjoyable, I could not recognize the dish that I grew used to in the state of Yucatán (see figure I.1). In 2000, when I moved back to Yucatán, I watched how friends' families and relatives all fell into a shopping and cooking frenzy during the winter holidays in anticipation of the Christmas Eve celebration. In different families, each member who was proud of his or her cooking abilities strove to contribute his or her best dish to the meal. Thus, for Christmas supper, families' tables could end up with two soups, one or two salads, at least one pasta dish, one or two fruit salads, baked ham, baked turkey, refried black beans, lobster or shrimp—and, of course, cod Biscayne-style. During supper, relatives and friends eased their food down with national or imported red, white, or sparkling wines; after the meal, they were served brandy, vodka, whiskey, or cognac.16
Figure I.1. Cod Biscayne-style, final stages of cooking
Dish elaborated by the author following the recipe of Gloria Vargas y Vargas. Photograph courtesy of G. Vargas Cetina, 2005.
Within my wife's family, one aunt has long been recognized as owning the ‘best' recipe for cod Biscayne-style. After a sustained monopoly (lasting longer than the 25 years that I have been related to her family), she selected me to inherit her ‘secret' recipe. She told me that she had developed her own recipe, taking her mother's dish as a starting point, but later including a different technique and adding an ingredient that she had learned about from a friend. Although not all regional versions are identical, her rendition of the dish fits the widespread Yucatecan understanding of the recipe, and most Yucatecans would probably recognize it as a variation on a commonly accepted culinary theme.
Thus, in order to satisfy our longing for the dish during that season of the year, especially during the weeks that precede Christmas Eve (when we would share our own Christmas dinner with relatives and friends), a party made up of myself, my wife, and some friends visited Yucatecan seafood restaurants and Mexican restaurants located in Mérida that annually list the dish in their menus, along with other central Mexican Christmas dishes, such as romeritos (see the glossary). In general, we found that the cod dish was in some places saltier, while in others the sauce was thicker. In some restaurants, the dish was spicy hot, while in others it was too bland for our taste. Overall, the different versions of the dish available in Yucatán looked alike, but they were unlike what my friend had cooked in Chiapas. In its different Yucatecan presentations, the cod had been coarsely shredded or cut into pieces and simmered in a tomato sauce with olives, with or without capers, with or without slices of pimiento (which some cooks blend into the sauce), and with or without croutons (or golden-fried slices of French bread). In addition, it was sometimes accompanied by refried black beans and sometimes not. Flavors and aromas varied according to the quality of the cod, the type of olive oil used, and whether the tomato sauce was freshly made or employed processed tomatoes.17
In a contrasting experience, sometime during the winter of 2001-2002, after learning of my research topic, a friend invited me to watch her mother cook cod Biscayne-style. She let me know that her mother's recipe was acclaimed as excellent by relatives and had been passed down in her family from one generation to the next. Her own sisters followed the same recipe for Christmas Eve dinner. In contrast to the willingness of my friend's mother to allow me to watch and film her while she cooked, my wife's aunt never allowed anybody to be present when she cooked the dish, even though help was offered when she began complaining about the heavy work that the dish demands of a person her age. She would tell us, every year, that her recipe was extremely elaborate and time-consuming. The preparation of the meal takes three days of work: soaking and washing the salt off the cod, boning and shredding it, frying in olive oil the different ingredients separately, mixing them in a specific order, and slowly simmering the whole before Christmas Eve supper. In contrast to her accounts, when I arrived at my friend's house, her mother had already prepped the cod—desalting, boning, and shredding it all in one morning—and she was about to start cooking. It took her less than two hours to have the dish simmering in a pot in a generous amount of Spanish olive oil.18 Somewhat surprised, I asked her whether the recipe she followed that day was a fast version that differed from what she did for Christmas Eve. She responded that it was her only version, the one that she and her sisters learned from her mother and that they all follow, including her daughters (adjusting this or that ingredient to satisfy each husband's or child's taste). When she finished the dish, the cod was bathed in Spanish olive oil, mixed with slices of tomato, sweet red pepper, olives, and fried garlic. I had witnessed the preparation of a version that was very different from those that I had previously encountered in Yucatán (at other friends' homes and at local restaurants) and from what I had been served at my friend's house in Chiapas.19
The different elaborations of the same dish—within Yucatán in particular and Mexico in general—illustrate the heterogeneity of the culinary field and its ties to the gastronomic field. On the one hand, within the Yucatecan region itself, one can find different versions of the same home-cooked dish that not only are considered acceptable for family members and friends but also are turned into the standard for judging other versions of the same dish. In this respect, the Yucatecan culinary field allows for the intersection of Yucatecan recipes with recipes from other regional Mexican and international culinary ‘traditions'. On the other hand, we find that the inscription of the dish in Yucatecan cookbooks and restaurant menus imposes a paradigmatic structure on the recipe that allows only minimal differences. Hence, although it is a seasonal dish from the regional culinary field, restaurant chefs and cooks have, to some degree, ‘fixed' the recipe, making one version more acceptable to regional consumers, with their aesthetic-based perception of the dish. Among other things, it must use a particular brand of olive oil, it must have been cooked with epazote leaves, and the ingredients have to be fried separately before being stewed together. The combination of ingredients and cooking techniques results in recognizable and desirable flavors, aromas, textures, and colors that set a standard to be met. A friend once cooked the same dish, but, seeking to save on olive oil, he did not fry all of the ingredients. Some guests who had eaten the food complained to me later that they found its texture to be odd, a result that they attributed to the failure to fry the ingredients.
There are, in addition, other arenas where the tension, and sometimes conflict, between Yucatecan and Mexican cultures is evident. In the contemporary post-national, post-colonial order, population flows force groups to enter into contact and to engage in negotiations over their different world-views and value systems (Kaplan 1996). The post-colonial is a complex sphere of interaction in which the experience of central Mexicans migrating into different Mexican regions cannot be compared conceptually to the forms of cultural subordination experienced, for example, by Mexican immigrants (from the center or elsewhere) in the United States. Sometimes central Mexicans who move into different regions feel entitled, as carriers of the cultural and colonial values embodied in national cultural icons
