Cookbooks and Mestizaje: Tracing Changing Ethnoracial Hierarchies through Interviews, Ethnography, and Food Recipes

What stories can food recipes and cookbooks tell us about racial hierarchies and nation-building? In the last few decades, historians, anthropologists, and cultural theorists started using cookbooks to reconstruct the histories of beliefs and debates about gender roles, class divisions, and technological advancement, among many other topics. I build on this line of scholarship to propose an approach to cookbooks that centers not only on the recipes as texts and primary sources but also as elements of social practices that configure fields of cultural creation, production, and reception, where concerns about ethnic and racial stigmas circulate and are reproduced or challenged. To exemplify this approach I present my work on the racial politics of Peruvian-style ceviche. I argue that since the late 1990s, Peruvian chefs sought to turn ceviche—which until then had a relatively marginal status in Peru’s culinary repertoire—into the national gastronomy’s flagship dish because it afforded them the ability to simultaneously make valid authenticity claims while foregrounding Japan’s influence in Peruvian cuisine. Ceviche’s material affordance to index Japanese culinary features (linked to technique and modernity) became a way to reduce the salience of qualities related to other heritages—particularly those associated with indigenous and urban poor populations.

Nino Bariola Gonzales is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Culinaria Research Centre and the Department of Physical and Environmental Sciences at the University of Toronto Scarborough. He is a cultural sociologist interested in food politics, environmental justice, and gender and racial inequalities. His book manuscript, ‘Ceviche Capitalism: Authenticity, Legitimacy, and the Globalization of an “Ethnic Cuisine,”’ examines how Peruvian cuisine became a consecrated global gastronomy after being scorned by international celebrity chefs and national elites.