Juana Manuela Gorriti's Cocina ecléctica: Recipes as Feminine Discourse

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

One of the books I brought home with me from my stint as a Senior Fulbright Lecturer in Buenos Aires in 1987 was Juana Manuela Gorriti's Cocina ecléctica, a facsimile version of the cookbook she compiled and edited shortly before her death in 1892; it was re-published in 1977. It took me a long time to find the precise date of its original publication, which is 1890. It seems appropriate to celebrate its centennial, for it really is a remarkable book.

I had bought Gorriti's book for several reasons. One, I am a passionate cook myself. Metaphors of the kitchen and culinary discourse thus held a particular attraction for me, as they did for the likes of Sor Juana, Rosario Castellanos and Rosario Ferré, who observed in her well-known essay «La cocina de la escritura» (published in La sartén por el mango), «escribir y cocinar a menudo se me confunden» (153). Two, I was interested in nineteenth-century women's literature and in the ways in which the writers of that time designed strategies to give lip service to the women as keeper of home and hearth while simultaneously breaking out of private into public discourse. Francine Masiello's excellent article on this topic points out how «the women of Argentina utilized the domestic sphere... to develop new codes of learning and enhanced their limited opportunities for public circulation by building intra-domestic networks of dialogue» (527), a dialogue of which cookbooks formed an integral part. Third, I wanted to know more about Gorriti as a writer and felt that her particular cookbook would give me some clues as to the network of friends on which so many 19th-century women writers depended for support and survival. Digging out texts written by early Spanish American women writers is often arduous enough, but re-establishing some of the social context out of which they wrote is even more difficult. My approach to Cocina ecléctica would thus be two-pronged: I was interested in what I could glean directly from the cookbook, and subsequently planned to use it as a springboard to other sources.

A cursory glance at Cocina ecléctica shows it to have a surprisingly familiar format: a compendium of recipes sent in by a considerable number of women, whose names appear at the end of their culinary contribution just like innumerable contemporary fund-raising cookbooks put out by church groups, schools, museums or Symphony orchestras. I own a number of there, and what often makes them sell are recipes contributed by celebrities in the world of the arts: Luciano Pavarotti's meatballs or Yehudi Menuhin's Eggplant Casserole, for example. Gorriti's book, too, features recipes by celebrities, in her case well-known writers such as Clorinda Matto de Turner, Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera and Adela Zamudio, or women who bore illustrious last names: Laura Ascasubi, Cristina Román de Palma. There is even one Porteña who insists on signing with her nickname 'Chinga', but I have'nt tracked down the etymology of that name thus far.

I was intrigued by this thoroughly modern format, and wondered where on earth Gorriti got this idea. Were there other South American cookbooks organized along similar lines? When did this type of cookbook originate here in this country? Was this format transmitted to Argentina via the United States? Whereas it was impossible for me to research the history of Argentinian cookbooks, I did ask a number of Argentinian friends if they could recall cookbooks with this particular format in their mothers' or grandmothers' collections, and none of them could. I had access to a Colombian work of this era, Aida Martínez Carreño's Mesa y cocina en el siglo XIX, which bore out the fact that

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Gorriti's type of cookbook was unknown in that country at least (107-27). With respect to the United States, a letter to Barbara Haber, curator of printed books at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, brought back some valuable information: according to a bibliography of Fund-Raising Cookbooks published in the U.S., this type of work originated around the time of the Civil War, «at Sanitary Fairs held to raise money for military casualties and their families. After the war was over, the ladies' aid societies formed during the war turned to local charities, and published their recipe collections to benefit hospitals, homes for the friendless, schools, and churches in every part of the country» (Cook, 7). But how did this idea reach Buenos Aires? Ricardo Rojas, the Argentine literary historian, provided what I conjecture might be a major clue. In his 1925 history of Argentine literature he includes a chapter on women writers and mentions the important role which the U.S. schoolteachers, brought down by Sarmiento in 1866, played in the formation of a whole generation of educated Argentine women: «Las maestras por él traídas de los Estados Unidos no tardaron en formar aventajadas discípulas criollas» (791). It seems entirely possible to me that Gorriti heard of the fund-raising cookbooks which were popular in the U.S. via one of there teachers, especially since she herself had founded schools in Lima and was in touch with women educators in both Peru and Argentina⁴². But no matter where Gorriti got the idea, the production of such a cookbook to earn money for herself made eminent economic sense. She was living on a pension paid to her by the Argentine government in recognition of her father's service to his country (Rojas 795), but she still depended on her pen for most of her livelihood and was by then seventy-one. Gorriti could draw on a wide spectrum of relatives and friends in the compilation of Cocina ecléctica, and from the contents of the book itself it appears that the idea met with great enthusiasm from the women she asked to participate in her project. After all, she was a very well-known writer whose book was bound to sell, and the recipe exchange was a satisfactory arrangement for both parties: Gorriti appropriated their contributions for her own use but reciprocated by giving them the opportunity of appearing as authors within her culinary text.

I don't know how many of you have read Susan Leonardi's splendid article entitled «Recipes for Reading», but if you haven't, there's a real treat in store for you. Leonardi takes culinary discourse seriously, seeing the act of recipe sharing as an «almost prototypical feminine activity» (343) which functions as a mark of women's relationships to each other: «the establishment of a lively narrator with a circle of enthusiastic and helpful friends reproduces the social context of recipe sharing -a loose community of women that crosses the social barriers of class, race and generation» (342)⁴³. In the process of sharing their recipes, many of Gorriti's friends also told stories, embedding the former within personal anecdotes which reveal a great deal about themselves. Cocina ecléctica is thus a fabulous mirror of the community of women with which Gorriti interacted.

Her «Prologue» is very curious and yet for her, also very typical. True to the philosophy of domesticity so popular in her time, Gorriti maintains that «el hogar es el santuario doméstico; su ara es el fogón; su sacerdotisa y guardián natural, la mujer» (15); in the next breath, however, she immediately distances herself from that traditional role:

She is effusive in her thanks to the friends who have made the book possible by their contributions, but refrains from including herself in this group by not contributing even one recipe of her own⁴⁴. I have noticed the same tactic in her role as creative writer: there is a very obvious discrepancy between the self-sacrificing domestic angels that people her fiction and Gorriti's own highly independent self. She separated from and later divorced her husband, Bolivian President Manuel Isidoro Belzú, openly had a number of affairs and at least two children out of wedlock, at times dressed in masculine attire and achieved financial independence by dint of her writing and teaching.

The broad range of contributors to Cocina ecléctica reveals a great deal about Gorriti's network of friends. One is immediately struck by the international scope of the participants. Besides Peru, Bolivia and Argentina, the there countries in which she had lived most of her long and colorful life, Gorriti had contributions from Chile, Uruguay, Mexico, France, Belgium, Spain,

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Germany and the United States. Sharing the recipe for certain national dishes was for some women a source of patriotic pride, couched in transports of lyrical prose, as in this description of causa, a Peruvian potato dish, and chicha, a beverage made of fermented corn: «Sí, causa es de gozo, para sus numerosos aficionados ... doble causa de gozo por el placer de saborearla, y por la obligada copa de exquisita chicha que ha de seguirle, y que en transparente garrafa se verá figurando entre los aristocráticos vinos: dorada y chispeante bebida, cuya receta he de dar todavía aquí» (188-89). Clorinda Matto de Turner is quick to point out the indigenous roots of this drink and to add a humanitarian observation:

Other recipes also attest to the ethnic diversity of South America. A Bolivian contributor insists that nowhere is rabbit better prepared than in her country; her compatriot Adela Zamudio concurs but makes a distinction in the condiments served with it: «Se le sirve con salsa de ají amarillo, para los criollos, y de mostaza inglesa para los extranjeros» (261). Gorriti's daughter Edelmira contributed a recipe for «humintas» which clearly underscored the contribution of the Indian in the preparation of these steamed packets of meat and corn wrapped in corn husks (77-80); there was also the touch of the gaucho in recipes for the tenderizing of meat and the proper preparation of «mate». Other recipes in the collection are purely European in origin, often obtained while travelling abroad, and sometimes associated with famous persons such as Queen Victoria, Napoleon, Mme. de Maintenon or the singer Adelina Patti. Some recipes are linked to South American history, such as «Dorado San Martín» or these «Balas del general», whose directions are couched as pure dialogue between three lovely criollas and an officer:

One of the three ladies rapidly assembled a platter of hard-boiled eggs stuffed with meat and served them lo the general, who pronounced them «Exquisitos proyectiles ... ellos me anuncian la victoria» (234).

The social stratification of the contributors to Cocina ecléctica is very obvious. They included married and single women, a few trained cooks, a nun and one man. Most of the women were upper-class, educated and if wealthy, usually also well-travelled. Many expressed pleasure at being asked to contribute and rejoiced in inserting their recipes into some amusing anecdote, as we have seen above. The cooks, probably because they belonged lo a different social stratum, never told stories. Among them, too, one gets an idea of social diversity. One of the cooks is black -«La negrita Encarnación» (60)- one appears to be a recent immigrant («Catalina Pardini-Cocinera napolitana» 246) and a third records her feelings on knowing that Gorriti's book will allow her name to appear there: «Cual si hubiera querido cumplirse en mí la exaltación de los humildes, hame tocado por suerte casual, que en este libro donde resplandecen tan distinguidos nombres, figure el mío pobre y oscuro» (358-59). At times it is clear that the mistresses appropriated their cooks' creations without acknowledging the names of the latter: one Elvira Vela sent in a recipe perfected by her cook and remarked, «Qué orgulloso estaría, si supiese que va a figurar en este sabio libro», (123), yet not only fails to mention his name, but signs her own at the end, modestly entitling the pastry in question «Embozo a la Elvirita».

As I mentioned in the introduction to this study, I was interested in Cocina ecléctica as a springboard to reconstructing some of the network of women with whom Juana Manuela had contact both in Lima and in Buenos Aires. She lived in Lima from 1850 to 1880, supporting herself by teaching and writing; she also organized a literary salon where both women and men from Lima's intellectual circles met to perform music or to read poetry, fiction, or essays. Shortly before her death Gorriti's son, Julio Sandoval, published the materials produced for his mother's Veladas literarias, and in an introductory letter to this work, Ricardo Palma recalled with pleasure «aquellas deliciosas noches, de cordiales, de íntimas expansiones, gozadas en el modesto, a la vez que elegante salón de la ilustre literata argentina» (vi). Gertrude Yeager's recent study of Gorriti's life documents a number of interesting observations about these gatherings: they lasted from about 8:30 in the evening to 3 in the morning, included famous writers as well as new talent and also Gorriti's students. «From the

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beginning, what made the veladas unique was the inclusion of women, not only as observers but also as participants... Each session included readings or performances by women of their compositions and a discussion of issues of interest to women... The veladas were enormously successful, and as many as fifty or sixty people attended on a regular basis» (123-24)⁴⁶. The Veladas document the salient preoccupations of Gorriti's circle of friends at that time: women's education and job training, historic and patriotic themes, literary studies, creative fiction and poetry. What this book does not contain is any biographical information about who these women were, and I would have remained in the dark had not my graduate student Claudia van der Heuvel unearthed a two-volume study called La mujer peruana a través de los siglos, edited by one Elvira García y García in 1924 and 1925. These volumes contain a fascinating compendium of biographical information about Peruvian women, from precolumbian times to the editor's present. Using Cocina ecléctica as a place to start, I made a list of all of the contributors from Peru (about half of the total number) and then checked these against the women mentioned in La mujer peruana; I was able to find eleven names and in comparing their respective biographies, began to find certain patterns emerging. Predictably, most of the women were upper class and most were, or had been, married. Several of them were widowed and in financial straits, having had reversals of fortune when their husbands died; like Gorriti, they turned to founding or teaching in girls' schools and to professional writing in newspapers and magazines to earn their livelihood. Most of them had had a sketchy or even deficient early education, but all of them were devoted to literature and became well-read by dint of great self-discipline. Education for women was a central concern, and became a connecting thread among a number of them. Teresa González de Fanning, for example, was one of Gorriti's close friends (as well as a contributor to the cookbook); like her she was a creative writer, a journalist and a founder of a colegio for girls; Elvira García y García, the editor of La mujer peruana, is listed on the front page as an ex-directress of the «Liceo Fanning». García frequently mentions the importance of Gorriti's salon -«las nunca olvidadas veladas» (52); «aquellas memorables veladas, que no han podido hasta hoy ser restauradas» (16), very obviously a major factor in the intellectual sustenance of these women. As one of my other graduate students put it, «The veladas must have been their life line».

The reconstruction of Gorriti's context in Peru proved easier than in Argentina; Lily Sosa de Newton's extensive Diccionario biográfico de mujeres argentinas provided scant information on only two more women: a sculptress (María Aguirre de Vassilicós, 17) and a writer from Santa Fe (Celestina Funes de Frutos, 251), who was the only one of these women to have received a university degree.

In the final analysis, then, Cocina ecléctica proved to be not only interesting reading in its own right but also a valuable tool in shedding light on Juana Manuela Gorriti and the women who formed her network of friends and soul sisters. Although Gorriti herself may not have been an enthusiastic cook, she certainly would have understood Patricia Storace's recent observation: «It is in eating that we first learn something of our power over our own life and death, and our capacity to live in company with others» (45). Some of the fabric of these women's inter-twined lives has come to light because of the gendered discourse of recipe sharing (Leonardi, 347), and so it seems only right to end on a culinary note. Did I find any recipes worth sharing with you? Two highly unusual ones come immediately to mind: «El huevo colosal» (250-53) and «Helado de espuma» (348-50). The gigantic egg is made by separating a number of eggs into yolks and whites. Take two animal bladders, one smaller than the other, and place all the yolks in the smaller of the two. Tie it shut, place it in boiling water and when the yolks are hard, remove the bladder. Place the outsize yolk in the center of the larger bladder, filled with the egg whites, tie it shut and boil until the whites are set. Peel off the bladder and serve the «huevo colosal, que en la mesa tiene hermosa vista, asentado sobre una salsa picante» (251-52).

The «Helado de espuma» is also unusual in its preparation, and according to its author can only be made in the altiplano or other really cold regions. Rise at five in the morning, fill two zinc milk pails half full of milk, cover and proceed as follows:

This frozen mixture is then flavored with sugar

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and cinnamon and brought to the table immediately. Häagen Dazs, move over.

Aresty, Esther B. The Delectable Past. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964.

Cook, Margaret. American's Charitable Cooks: A Bibliography of Fund-Raising Cook Books Published in the United States (1861-1915). Kent, Ohio, 1971.

Ferré, Rosario. «La cocina de la escritura». La sartén por el mango. Encuentro de escritoras hispanoamericanas. Eds. Patricia Elena González y Eliana Ortega. Río Piedras, P.R.: 1984. 137-54.

García y García, Elvira. La mujer peruana a través de los siglos. Serie historiada de estudios y observaciones. 2 vols. Lima: Imprenta Americana, 1924-25.

Gorriti, Juana Manuela. Cocina ecléctica. 1890. Buenos Aires: Librería Sarmiento, 1977.

_____. Veladas literarias de Lima. 1876-77. Buenos Aires: Imprenta Europea, 1892.

Leonardi, Susan J. «Recipes for Reading: Summer Pasta, Lobster à la Riseholme, and Key Lime Pie». PMLA 104 (May 1989): 340-47.

Martínez Carreño, Aida. Mesa y cocina en el siglo XIX. Bogotá: Fondo Cultural Cafetero, 1985.

Masiello, Francine. «Between Civilization and Barbarism: Women, Family and Literary Culture in Mid-Nineteenth Century Argentina». Cultural and Historical Grounding For Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Feminist Literary Criticism. Ed. Hernán Vidal. Minneapolis, MN: Institute for the Study of Ideologies and Literature, 1989. 517-66.

Matto de Turner, Clorinda. Aves sin nido. 1889. Lima: Ediciones Peisa, 1984.

Meehan, Thomas C. «Una olvidada precursora de la literatura fantástica argentina: Juana Manuela Gorriti». Chasqui 10 (Febrero-Mayo 1981): 3-19.

Rojas, Ricardo. La literatura argentina. Ensayo filosófico sobre la evolución de la cultura en el Plata. 2ªed. 8 vols. Buenos Aires: Librería «La Facultad», 1925. Vol. 7-8.

Sosa de Newton, Lily. Diccionario biográfico de mujeres argentinas. 38 ed. Buenos Aires: Plus Ultra, 1986.

Storace, Patricia. «The Art of M.F.K. Fisher». The New York Review of Books (Dee. 7, 1989) 41-45.

Yeager, Gertrude. «Juana Manuela Gorriti: Writer in Exile». The Human Factor in Latin America. The Nineteenth Century. Eds. William H. Beezley and Judith Ewell. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1989. 114-27.

Hispania [Publicaciones periódicas]. Volume 75, Number 2, May 1992