"Literally, chilaquiles are a breakfast I grew up eating: fried
corn tortillas with tomato-chile sauce. Symbolically, they are the
culinary metaphor for how working-class women speak with the
seasoning of their food."-from the Introduction Through the ages
and across cultures, women have carved out a domain in which their
cooking allowed them to express themselves, strengthen family
relationships, and create a world of shared meanings with other
women. In Voices in the Kitchen, Meredith E. Abarca features the
voices of her mother and several other family members and friends,
seated at their kitchen tables, to share the grassroots world view
of these working-class Mexican and Mexican American women. In the
kitchen, Abarca demonstrates, women assert their own sazon
(seasoning), not only in their cooking but also in their lives.
Through a series of oral histories, or charlas culinarias (culinary
chats), the women interviewed address issues of space, sensual
knowledge, artistic and narrative expression, and cultural and
social change. From her mother's breakfast chilaquiles to the most
elaborate traditional dinner, these women share their lives as they
share their savory, symbolic, and theoretical meanings of food. The
charlas culinarias represent spoken personal narratives,
testimonial autobiography, and a form of culinary memoir, one
created by the cooks-as-writers who speak from their kitchen space.
Abarca then looks at writers-as-cooks to add an additional
dimension to the understanding of women's power to define
themselves. Voices in the Kitchen joins the extensive culinary
research of the last decade in exploring the importance of the
knowledge found in the practical, concrete, and temporal aspects of
the ordinary practice of everyday cooking. Born in Nuevo Laredo,
Tamaulipas, Mexico, Meredith E. Abarca moved with her family to the
United States as a young child. She received her Ph.D. from the
University of California, Davis, and is an associate professor of
English at the University of Texas at El Paso.
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