Women’s Work

Rebecca Ingram

Description

Winner, Gourmand World Cookbook Awards, 2023—Best Women of the World Book, Spain

We are living in a moment in which famous chefs, Michelin stars, culinary techniques, and gastronomical accolades attract moneyed tourists to Spain from all over the world. This has prompted the Spanish government to declare its cuisine as part of Spanish patrimony. Even with this widespread global attention, we know little about how Spanish cooking became a litmus test for demonstrating Spain's modernity and, relatedly, the roles ascribed to the modern Spanish women responsible for daily cooking.

Efforts to articulate a new, modern Spain infiltrated writing in multiple genres and media. Women's Work offers a sharp reading of diverse sources, placed in their historical context, that yields a better understanding of the roles of food within an inherently uneven modernization process. Further, author Rebecca Ingram's perceptive critique reveals the paradoxical messages women have navigated, even in texts about a daily practice that shaped their domestic and work lives. Women's Work posits that this is significant because of the degree to which domestic activities, including cooking, occupied women's daily lives, even while issues like their fitness as citizens and participation in the public sphere were hotly debated. At the same time, progressive intellectuals from diverse backgrounds began to invoke Spanish cooking and eating as one measure of Spanish modernity.

Women's Work shows how culinary writing engaged these debates and reached women at the site of much of their daily labor—the kitchen—and, in this way, shaped their thinking about their roles in modernizing Spain.
Introduction
Chapter 1: Emilia Pardo Bazán: Culinary Nationalist and Ambivalent Feminist
Chapter 2: Frivolous and Feminist: Carmen de Burgos’s Culinary-Political Platform
Chapter 3: Mythologies of Culinary Modernity: Gregorio Marañón and Nicolasa Pradera
Chapter 4: Cooking and Civic Virtue: Women, Work, and Barcelona
Conclusion: Feminist Food Studies and Spain
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Cuisine
• La cuisine et son histoire
• Carmen de Burgos
• Regenerationism
• Spanish cuisine
• Spain
• Cooking
• Spain (groupe)
• Emilia Pardo Bazán
• History
• Gregorio Marañón

Informations

• Publié par: Vanderbilt University Press
• Date de parution: 15 septembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780826504913
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

WOMEN’S WORK
WOMEN’S WORK
How Culinary Cultures Shaped Modern Spain
Rebecca Ingram
VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY PRESS
Nashville, Tennessee
Copyright 2022 Vanderbilt University Press
All rights reserved
First printing 2022
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ingram, Rebecca, 1977- author.
Title: Women’s work : how culinary cultures shaped modern Spain / Rebecca Ingram.
Description: Nashville, Tennessee : Vanderbilt University Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022005479 (print) | LCCN 2022005480 (ebook) | ISBN 9780826504890 (paperback) | ISBN 9780826504906 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780826504913 (epub) | ISBN 9780826504920 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Food habits—Spain. | Cooking—Spain—History. | Women—Spain—Social conditions—History. | Social role—Spain—History. | Spain—Social life and customs. | Feminism—Spain.
Classification: LCC GT2853.S7 I54 2022 (print) | LCC GT2853.S7 (ebook) | DDC 394.1/20946—dc23/eng/20220215
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022005479
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022005480
In memory of Helen Christine Nelms Windham
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
1. Emilia Pardo Bazán: Culinary Nationalist and Ambivalent Feminist
2. Frivolous and Feminist: Carmen de Burgos’s Culinary-Political Platform
3. Mythologies of Culinary Modernity: Gregorio Marañón and Nicolasa Pradera
4. Cooking and Civic Virtue: Women, Work, and Barcelona
CONCLUSION: Feminist Food Studies and Spain
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
One summer in the mid-nineties, I was sitting in the air conditioning in my Grandmama’s dining room. Calling it a dining room makes it seem grander than it actually was. Her house was a very modest one (the air conditioning was a recent upgrade), originally with only two bedrooms and no indoor plumbing, that she and my grandfather shared with two maiden aunts during the early years of their marriage. The kitchen was galley style. Any overnight visitors were always woken at six in the morning by the banging pots as she put clean dishes away or took them out to get started on the project of the day. Breakfast was usually eggs, a bit of meat (bacon or smoked sausage), and toasted white bread. Grandmama thought it was special to make pancakes for her grandchildren. But I always preferred her biscuits, made with White Lily flour and butter-flavored Crisco. Ingredients were never measured; she made them by feel as her hand combined the flour and the fat and then she added buttermilk a little at a time.
One day that summer Grandmama was cleaning out an old cabinet. She tasked me with coming up with what we should have for supper, something that used what was left of an economy pack of ground beef from the local Piggly Wiggly. Rifling through all the papers and assorted church cookbooks from the cabinet, I came upon a recipe pamphlet that looked old. On closer inspection it was a book of recipes that came with a gas range, one that she and Grandpa had bought new from Sears & Roebuck in the 1960s. Sure that I would find a tasty recipe for something new in that book, I paged through the recipes.
I don’t recall details now. But I do remember the feeling of how that recipe booklet and the instructions within it placed me as a reader in a different time. Grandmama and I had a conversation about them. I asked her what she had cooked from it, if anything—she really only followed recipes for baking. We paged through the book. And she reminisced about the new stove in those days, what it meant to be able to buy a new appliance. The cooking she did on it was part of her everyday. It was her daily labor as a rural woman living her life in the post-war Southern United States. She fed her family, preparing special meals for birthdays; she cared for and harvested the crops on the acres surrounding the house; she kept a cow to milk, chickens for eggs and occasionally for the pot, and pigs. These daily tasks were part of the way she sustained her family and community and also produced a small, extra income. It was also a way of life for a woman who was the daughter of white sharecroppers, proud to graduate from high school, but explicitly discouraged from a college education, even when a neighboring family that had recognized her intelligence wanted to make it possible for her to attend the local Bible college.
When I think about how cooking is represented in texts, women’s foodwork and its intersections with social class, it’s impossible for me to separate those interests from what I learned through watching and doing cooking in my grandmother’s kitchen. I understood the meanings food could produce and communicate, how foodways could shift over time, for example, with the preference for processed white bread over homemade biscuits or cornbread that were normal during my mother’s childhood. Tastes evolved—Grandmama loved pizza and welcomed the visits of grandchildren to go out for it. The modernization of her kitchen meant that I knew it with a dishwasher, a toaster oven, and an electric coffee maker and can opener. Cooking structured her community alongside the local Baptist church. Church dinners featured the dishes each family was known for, vegetables grown in gardens, all served on purpose-built tables outside under the pine trees. Food served as an affective language to communicate love, caregiving, desire for success, and abundance in a life and lifestyle that was shaped by thrift even far long after the need for it was pressing.
My grandmother didn’t know much about Spain, other than that I started going there in 1996. But the first and only plane ride she ever took was to come see me in Spain after my study-abroad semester in Salamanca concluded. She approved of the strong coffee even if she added a little hot water to it to suit her tastes. She rode a subway for the very first time. And she appreciated all the gardens and plants we saw on our walks around Madrid, Ávila, and Santiago de Compostela. She disliked ordering two plates for meals—it was too much food!—and I didn’t know enough at that point to recommend she order a plato único in the restaurants we visited.
When I ask students to think about their food identities in the food studies classes I teach, I do the assignment with them. I think about how my food identities grew from this context and gave the foundation for the questions I ask in this book. For these reasons, I dedicate this book to Helen Christine Nelms Windham.
Women’s Work was made possible by support from my home institution, the University of San Diego. My 2015–2016 sabbatical allowed me to complete the archival work for Chapter 4 . Faculty research grants from the College of Arts and Sciences gave me extra time for writing, and research support from Dean Noelle Norton sustained the momentum of my work throughout 2020 and through the final stages of completing this book. The USD International Center’s award of international opportunity grants paid for several plane tickets so I could stretch limited research funding.
I thank Annabel Martín, with whom I discovered a deep love for research and reading about Spain and its complexities as an undergraduate. She has always been an exceptional role model in this career along with Stephanie Sieburth, who shaped me into the scholar I am today. I will never have a more insightful reader than Stephanie or more supportive mentor. Early conversations about this work with Maite Zubiaurre and Robert Davidson were formative. And later, Roberta Johnson’s comments on sections of Chapter 1 solidified certain ideas and opened my eyes to new areas. In the field, there is no better person to know or more insightful scholar of Spain’s feminisms and feminist studies. What I have developed here owes an enormous debt to her corpus of work.
I also acknowledge the staff and librarians at the Biblioteca Nacional de España and the Biblioteca de Catalunya. Of special note, the director of the Biblioteca Francesca Bonnemaison, Raquel Muñoz Carrilero, and librarian Maria Oriola Tarragó were instrumental in allowing me access to the archives and materials of the Institut de Cultura i Biblioteca Popular de la Dona in 2015. Moreover, conversations with historians María del Carmen Simón Palmer and Isabel Segura Soriano were illuminating and influential, as is their scholarship.
This work has benefited from a number of interlocutors over the years: Heather Mallory, Zachary Erwin, Virginie Pouzet-Duzer from the early days at Duke. Zack, with the eyes of a “real Pardo Bazánista” read and commented on my Pardo Bazán chapter, for which I’m grateful. Martin Repinecz, my current colleague (lucky me!) and long-time friend, commented on Chapter 3 and improved it tremendously. Liana Ewald and I discussed Women’s Work and the long nineteenth-century innumerable times, first in San Diego and then via Facetime and Skype. María Paz Moreno and Lara Anderson have been and continue to be exceptional compañeras in working to develop food studies within peninsular cultural studies more broadly. I am grateful to them both for their scholarship and friendship.
Jeannette Acevedo Rivera and Susan Larson invited me to speak about this project at their universities, and I appreciated tremendously the thoughtful questions from their students and colleagues. I also thank Eugenia Afinoguénova for her support and her invitation to present Chapter 4 to the colloquium on Gastrocracy, nature, and degrowth that she convened in 2020. The enthusiastic reception of the chapter and questions from participants shaped my revision of that chapter to its current form. Thanks, too, to Suzanne Dunai, whose passion for food history and Spain is always motivating.
I extend a special acknowledgment to the editors and publishers who kindly allowed me to include previously published research in this book. Sections of Chapter 1 were published as “Popular Tradition and Bourgeois El