Timeless Mexican recipes
Updated 3:04 pm, Monday, April 7, 2014
SAN ANTONIO — The oldest cookbook in a special collection at the University of Texas at San Antonio dates back 56 years before Texas became a state and nearly 100 years before construction finished on the state capitol.
The book is a manuscript written in 1789, containing recipes that include “gaspacho,” “zopa de naranja,” (orange soup) and a dish called “potaje escondido,” or hidden porridge.
It's one of many gems in a collection of more than 1,200 books, among largest of its kind in the country.
“Cookbooks aren't a direct window into what people eat,” said Juli McLoone, rare-books librarian at UTSA who manages the collection. “They're a window into what they would like to eat, what they would like other people to think that they eat or what they think other people should eat.”
The collection began with an initial donation in 2001 of more than 100 cookbooks from Laurie Gruenbeck, a librarian and lover of Mexican cooking who wanted her books to be accessible to scholars and the public, McLoone said.
Since then, others have donated books to the university, and library staff members have bought books to add to the collection.
The collection also holds Tex-Mex and Southwestern volumes, and books from Mexico that aren't necessarily about Mexican cuisine.
The collection includes 37 books from Josefina Velázquez de León, a critically important figure in Mexican cuisine who is now largely forgotten.
During her heyday from the 1940s until the 1960s, she ran her own cooking school, publishing company and even a cooking show.
The library also has a first edition of the first cookbook published in Mexico, “El Cocinero Mexicano, o Colección de la Mejores Recetas,” and from that same year, another influential book, “Novisimo arte de cocina.”
As the cookbooks progress over the years, authors grew more proficient in writing instructions. The Mexican cookbooks also show the evolution in Mexican culture, from the strong influence of France and French cooking to how authors began to look at cuisine as a way of establishing a unique Mexican identity, especially toward the end of the 19th century.
“Food is how we accomplish biological reproduction and cultural reproduction,” McLoone said, “so there's a lot of ideology attached to food and who eats what.”
A peek into the collection is readily accessible with just a few clicks on a computer. The library established a blog to help share the collection beyond the university. The address: la cocinahistorica.wordpress.com.
Among the contributors to the blog is Del De La Cruz, an assistant with the UTSA libraries. A Del Rio native, he made Tepache, a fermented pineapple drink, and a shrimp soup, “Caldo de Camarón de Cantina.”
Both recipes didn't look very pretty, but tasted good, he said.
“I remember that the instructions for both were not very detailed,” he said, “especially for a novice like me.”
Next for the collection is to increase its holdings of historical manuscript cookbooks and more documentation from home cooks.
“The descendant to this is the recipe-card box of the 1950s,” McLoone said. “I would love it if somebody were to walk in tomorrow and say they have their grandmother's recipe-card box and the mix of what was being cooked in San Antonio in 1955.”
So if you have a recipe-card box from that time period, UTSA is interested.
But dealing with cookbooks brings some unique challenges.
“In traditional book collecting, you're looking for the most pristine copy. That doesn't really happen in cookbooks,” McLoone said. “In book studies, people are always looking for annotations. When you're cooking, your splash of cake batter is your annotation. That's how you know this is one people were actually eating.”