Food, Texts, and Cultures in Latin America and Spain

Rafael Climent-Espino, Ana M. Gomez-Bravo, Rafael Climent-Espino, Ana M. Gomez-Bravo

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780826522832
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política agrícola pública

The fourteen essays in Food, Texts, and Cultures in Latin America and Spain showcase the eye-opening potential of a food lens within colonial studies, ethnic and racial studies, gender and sexuality studies, and studies of power dynamics, nationalisms and nation building, theories of embodiment, and identity. In short, Food, Texts, and Cultures in Latin America and Spain grapples with an emerging field in need of a foundational text, and does so from multiple angles.

The studies span from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, and the contributing scholars occupy diverse fields within Latin American and Hispanic Studies. As such, their essays showcase eclectic critical and theoretical approaches to the subject of Latin American and Iberian food.

Food, Texts, and Cultures in Latin America and Spain also introduces the first English-language publication of works from such award-winning scholars as Adolfo Castañón of the Mexican Academy of Language; Sergio Ramírez, winner of the 2017 Miguel de Cervantes Prize in Literature; and Carmen Simón Palmer, winner of the 2015 Julián Marías Prize for Research.

CHAPTER 1

Food, Blood, and a Jewish Raza in Fifteenth-Century Spain

Ana M. Gómez-Bravo, University of Washington

THE PEACEFUL COEXISTENCE of the “three cultures” in medieval Iberia—Christian, Jewish, and Muslim—known as “convivencia” had quickly begun deteriorating toward the later Middle Ages, most notably after the 1391 pogroms that raided the Peninsula and resulted in the destruction of whole Jewish communities. The growing and often forceful pressure on Jewish communities to assimilate that came from the Church, the Christian population, and, increasingly, the state resulted in the rapid growth of a new social group, the conversos, or converts from Judaism to Christianity.¹ From the standpoint of religion, the body politic and the social order, the conversos were hard to fit into existing taxonomies and challenged notions of individual and group identities. Exactly who these conversos were, how Christian they were, and what role they played in the social body were highly contested questions. It was widely agreed that the converso was a hybrid that needed to be closely examined in order to determine the degree of underlying Jewishness. The conversos had their advocates who, citing such authorities as Paul, argued that baptism was the great equalizer and that all Christians, both old and new, were on par with each other and should be treated equally by the Church (and supposedly the Crown and municipalities).² However, many considered conversos as second-class Christians and citizens, seeing them as monstrous hybrids that remained partly or entirely Jewish. Hence, the difference between “new” and “old” Christians was in some cases more biological than religious, and the difference was drawn between new Christians and “Christians by nature” (“de natura”).³ The animosity against the conversos precipitated the institution of the purity of blood statutes, laid out in Pedro Sarmiento’s 1449 Sentencia-Estatuto (in Benito Ruano, Los orígenes 39–92) and the 1478 papal bull (Exigit sincerae devotionis; in Beltrán de Heredia) authorizing the creation of the Spanish Inquisition. The purity of blood statutes sought to legally discriminate against anyone of Jewish or Muslim ancestry by preventing them from holding office in the Church and in government institutions, schools, universities, and guilds, while the Inquisition attempted to eradicate heresy and heretics, which in its early years included mostly Jewish conversos.⁴ However, as scholars have noted, the issues involved in both the purity of blood statutes and the work of the Inquisition are hardly the sole domain of religion (Cuart Moner; García Cárcel; Kamen). Rather, they also involve contemporary ideas on blood and lineage and psychobiological theories (based on humoral theory).⁵ In a departure from current scholarship on early racism, this study contends that the early articulation of difference did not rest on the strength of genealogical considerations but rather on the conceptualization of inborn qualities that resided in the blood and were acquired in the process of generation and through food intake.

Several scholars have highlighted the medieval period’s central importance in any study on race. Heng has made a powerful argument for the invention of race in the European Middle Ages, and scholars such as Hering Torres and María Elena Martínez have pointed to the key importance that medieval developments had on the birth of racism(s) in the modern period, a line of inquiry that has been further bolstered by the evidence presented by the uses of the word raza (race) beginning in late-medieval texts. The importance of understanding the semantic field(s) of raza is underscored, among other considerations, by the presence of the term in the formulae used in purity of blood documents, where an individual must be shown to be “without raza of Jews, Muslims, or anyone condemned by the Inquisition” in order to be proven as an old Christian and accepted into the institutions requiring such proof. In order to better understand some of the complexities of all the forces at play, it is important to look at late-medieval ideas on generation and bodily constitution and, in particular, the role that religious and medical practices assign to food as well as the ways these theories are mirrored in literature and culture. As the texts examined here show, food played a central role in the attempts to justify ethnoracial difference by helping to root it in the biological, within the body. The popularity of these ideas is evident in broadly circulated texts, as well as in more specialized treatises.

The Converso Mark

A growing body of slanderous texts sought to denounce the true nature of the conversos, claiming to bring into the light their covert practices. A poem by Comendador Román written in the last decades of the fifteenth century and directed to Antón de Montoro, a converso tailor and poet living in Córdoba, attempted to expose Montoro in that fashion. The long poem “Antón parias sin arrisco” (199–205), morphs into a long list of topics suitable for Montoro’s pen, which include foods within the dietary laws of kashrut. It states that Montoro’s poetry should deal with the observation of the Sabbath (sabadear), the eating of ollas without eel, hare, or pork (tocino), which are all forbidden, but with the addition of mutton slaughtered according to the laws of kashrut, as well as cilantro, eggplant, roasted eggs, and acorns. All this needs to be slow-cooked overnight (trasnochado). Montoro should also drink kosher wine and eat unleavened bread and kosher meat. He should be attired in Jewish garb, pray and study Jewish texts (meldar), and hold stereotypical Jewish professions.⁶ While some of these admonishments regarding diet are intended as satirical and seek to uncover Montoro’s Jewish practices by following the laws of kashrut, many of the foods mentioned, chickpeas and spinach for example, do not have assigned kosher values, but they are marked Jewish and understood to be recognized as such by the readers. In one important poem written toward the end of his life, Montoro complained in turn that, in spite of his behaving like a Christian and eating like a Christian, he could never pray long or hard enough because his Jewish identity was indelibly marked in him:

Oh bitter, sad tailor

don’t you feel your pain!

Born seventy years ago

you always recited

your Marian hymns

and never swore against God!

I said the Creed and adored

pots filled with fatty pork,

and half-cooked rashers;

I listened to Mass and prayed

making the sign of the Cross

and I could never kill

this converso mark.⁷

The problematic “mark” of the converso to which Montoro refers in such bitter terms was the subject of most legal, medical, and religious writings attempting to elucidate the nature of the conversos.

Marked by an Indelible Character: Food and Baptism

Andrés Bernáldez, chaplain to Diego de Deza, who became inquisitor general of Castile, was a self-appointed chronicler of his time. An important topic in his chronicle, or as he termed it, “memory book,” of the reign of Catholic monarchs Isabel and Fernando was the so-called “converso problem.” His work, which was widely copied through later centuries, exposes the terms of animosity against the conversos, which include to a large degree the foods that the conversos (and Jews) ate as the source of their despicable nature:

You should know that the customs of the common people among [the conversos] before the Inquisition were no more and no less than those of the foul-smelling Jews themselves, and the cause of this was the continuous contact that they had with them. [The conversos] were so greedy and such gluttons that they never stopped eating according to Jewish custom dishes and pots of adefinas [Sabbath stew], dishes of onions and garlic fried in oil; and they cooked the meat with oil, which they used instead of salt pork and fat so as to avoid using pork; and the meat cooked with oil and all the other things that they cook cause terrible breath, and likewise from their homes and doors emanated a horrible stench because of those dishes; and they themselves smelled like Jews because of all these foods and because they were not baptized. And even assuming that some were baptized, since nullity and judaizing deadened the character of baptism in them, they reeked like the Jews. They did not eat pork unless they were forced to do it; they ate meat during Lent, vigils, and in the four periods of mandated abstinence in secret; they observed their holidays and Sabbaths as best they could; they sent oil for the lamps to the synagogues; they had Jews who would preach to them in their homes in secret, particularly the women. They had rabbi Jews that slit the throats of cattle and birds for them; they ate unleavened bread when it was mandated for the Jews and clean meat, performing all the Jewish ceremonies in secret, whenever they could, men as well as women.⁸

It is telling that Bernáldez mentions adherence to kosher laws only after establishing that the Jewish and converso body is abominable due to the adafinas (Sabbath stew or one-pot dish) and other specific foods that feed it, as well as the cooking techniques that are presented to be quintessentially Jewish.⁹ The negative aspects of Jewish (and converso) food consumption are not based merely on the ritual adherence to kosher laws but also on the inherent loathsomeness of the food cooked and consumed by them, with its manifestation on a particular odor, the foetor Judaicus that also characterizes Jewish depictions during the period.¹⁰ Such mentions of Jewish odor appear in other late medieval texts, like the poem “A mí grave me sería” by Pero González de Mendoza, where this old Christian noble compares his own food choices with those of the inhabitants of the Jewish Quarter, or Judería:

It would be a grave thing for me

to leave the meadows with flowers,

in May, the cold fountain,

lush gardens with nightingales,

to go to the Jewish quarter

to live among tanners,

where there are such smells,

where good smell has no place.

How will I leave the mountains,

where there is fine air and fine trout,

to go and dwell in the place

where there are melons and mushrooms,¹¹

where people shut themselves

within thick curtains,

celebrations and the smell of adefinas,

which I do not feel whom it will not kill? . . .

How will I leave partridges

in winter, when they are wholesome,

in summer, quail

to hunt in the morning,

to go with such noses

where the attractive women live,

who with their great pride

make a mockery out of every man?¹²

The main force of Bernáldez’s argument rests on the weight he gives to food consumption, which marks the body with traits that are put on par with baptism, a sacrament that, according to Church doctrine, imprints indelible character. According to Bernáldez, both Jewish food and lack of baptism bear the same physical imprint, and both result in a detectable (sensorial) Jewishness. However, Jewishness had become by Bernáldez’s time very hard to detect visually, which presented a problem for the state and resulted in the repeated (and largely unsuccessful) attempts to impose visual markers by way of regulations on hair, clothing, headdress, and (for the men) beard styles, as well as external markings on the clothes such as the red circle (rodela roja), as is evident for example in the 1412 Pragmática given by Queen Catalina de Lancaster (Suárez Bilbao 425–30).¹³ Stereotypical representations of Jews in visual art stress a difference in the Jewish body that was not empirically proven (Resnick 268–319). These representations are telling in scenes depicting the baptism of Jews, as they highlight the physically transformative power of the sacrament. In the miniatures in Alfonso X’s Cantigas de Santa María, the Jews, depicted with the stereotypical features of the time, including a malevolent gaze, closely set almond-shaped eyes, a hook nose and conical hat, emerge from the baptismal waters looking like the figures depicted as Chri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Food Studies in Latin American and Spanish Contexts
• 1. Food, Blood, and a Jewish Raza in Fifteenth-Century Spain
• 2. Taste and Taxonomy of Native Food in Hispanic America: 1492–1640
• 3. Still Life, Food, and Fiction: Diversions from the Colonial Baroque
• 4. Furniture and Equipment in the Royal Kitchens of Early Modern Spain
• 5. Enlightened Meals: Literary Perspectives on Food in Eighteenth-Century Spain
• 6. Madrid: Cuisine as Cultural Melting Pot
• 7. Beyond the Recipes: Authorship, Text, and Context in Canonical Spanish Cookbooks
• 8. Cooks and Ladies: The Writing of Culinary Knowledge in Argentina in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
• 9. The Evolution of Mexican Cuisine: Five Gastronomical Seasons, Mole, Pozole, Tamal, Tortilla, and Chile Relleno
• 10. What the Palate Knows: Nicaragua’s Culinary Cultures
• 11. A Gastrocritical Reading of Miguel Ángel Asturias’s Early Narrative: Legends of Guatemala, The President, and Men of Maize
• 12. On Hunger and Brazilian Literature
• 13. Food in Recent Cuban Literature (1990–2016): From Hero in the Special Period Fiction to Almost Zero in the Generation Zero
• Index