Ceviche, quinoa, causa—dishes and ingredients previously unfamiliar to most outside of Peru (and neighboring nations in the Pacific region of South America) are today sought after in cities across the United States and Europe. In the twenty-first century, Peru has become a beloved “food nation,” exporting chefs and luring tourists with promises of its tasty and (supposedly) traditional cuisine.
Who is responsible for the contemporary fame of Peru’s culinary repertoire? According to the mass media, a new generation of celebrity chefs—all male—deserve credit. However, according to anthropologist Amy Cox Hall, we would be well served to shift our attention to the Peruvian women who have, in fact, done most of the cooking.
In The Taste of Nostalgia: Women, Race, and Culinary Longing in Peru, Cox Hall highlights the central role that women played in shaping Peru’s modernization and food culture. Focusing on women in the capital city of Lima during the Cold War era, she explains that women’s “cultivation of good taste” enabled the state to “make global capitalism palatable” (10). Cox Hall emphasizes that this was not a gender- or race-neutral project. Instead, elite White women (defined as such through their patterns of consumption and cultural representations) took the lead in promoting new whitening technologies, such as the blender, and products, such as margarine, that brought industrial modernity into the home. White cookbook authors and companies also exploited the fame of Black and Brown cooks, positioning themselves as heirs to their work in the kitchen and the mestizaje, or racial mixture, of Peru. Cox Hall argues that “often predicated on the labor, tastes, and reputations of other women from differing social-racial economic classes, women of privilege labored within the deeply racialized and gendered world of food to help set the stage for a globally expansive twenty-first-century food nationalism” (9).
The author combines field work, oral histories, cookbooks, ephemera, advertisements, and her own experiences to provide a rich narrative accompanied by a significant number of compelling visual sources. She alternates seven body chapters with excerpts from her oral histories. This structure allows the reader to toggle back and forth between Cox Hall’s perspectives and those of the numerous people she interviewed.
One of the most important contributions of this book is the way it reconstructs the specific stories of women who cooked for a living. Readers learn about the instructors (such as Mercedes Gallagher de Parks) of the popular domestic science classes at Bien del Hogar and the writers (often one in the same) who penned its magazine. We also meet cookbook authors. One of the most influential and interesting is Zoila Patroni, an elite woman of Italian descent who published a popular cookbook under the pseudonym Francisca Baylón. Intriguingly, Cox Hall reveals that few knew Patroni had published the cookbook and instead believed it was authored by the Black woman who graced its cover. Peru’s contemporary celebrity chef par excellence, Gastón Acurio, even repeated this mistake when making Patroni’s recipes on television, pronouncing that they were created by a famous Black cook.
Cox Hall also draws out the history of María Rosa (Rosita) Ríos Portales, an Afro-Peruvian woman who opened a widely successful restaurant in 1935 that was frequented by members of all social classes and racialized groups, including Peruvian presidents, during the twentieth century. We learn less about the many other Black and Brown women who cooked for a living and played crucial roles in setting down the roots for Peru’s culinary celebrity. These are protagonists to which future authors will hopefully turn their attention.
The first generation of professionally trained television celebrities are also given their due here. Notably, despite their tremendous training and skills, Teresa Ocampo, Amalia Noriega de Semsch, and Paola Marsano (the first woman from Peru to receive the title of chef after training at Le Cordon Bleu in France) found themselves cooking for corporate sponsors and were relegated to the margins of Peru’s culinary history. Even when such women are remembered, Cox Hall points out, they are never regarded with the same level of respect as male celebrity chefs. Women’s cooking was—and in many ways continues to be—considered a domestic craft rather than a culinary art.
As the interest in Peruvian food and (mostly male) celebrity chefs expands, the ability to understand the deeper roots of this history is a gift. Written with lively prose and useful historical context, The Taste of Nostalgia will appeal to readers at the undergraduate and graduate levels as well as those beyond the academy. Those with an interest in food, Peru, women, and the everyday processes of modernization and memorialization in Latin America will find much to chew on in this thought-provoking book.
