Rachel Laudan

A Small Cautionary Tale about Cookbooks and Authenticity

When I moved to Mexico in the mid 1990s, I took a series of cooking classes from a very charming and knowledgeable Mexican woman.  She started each class by passing out a set of typewritten, photocopied sheets of headnotes and recipes. I assumed that they came from a long family tradition.

Only several years later did I realize that they had all been taken from Mexico the Beautiful Cookbook (1991).  Susanna Palazuelos, a Mexican entrepreneur and restaurateur in Acapulco, had provided the recipes.  Marilyn Tausend, an American who for decades led culinary tours to Mexico and who was to go on to write several more Mexican cookbooks, had written the text.

I need hardly say that my cooking class teacher knew nothing about plagiarism. As a single mother, she was simply trying to make a living by teaching Americans Mexican cooking.

Recipes are hard to develop. Writing them in a foreign language according to the expectations of speakers of that language is even harder. She found that the authors of Mexico the Beautiful had done the work for her.

At least the recipes had come from a Mexican family tradition, that of Susanna Palazuelos.

Or had they? I never met Susanna Palazuelos. Everything I read about her, though, suggests she came from that stratum of Mexican society where home food was French food. “We never cooked Mexican at home” as María Dolores Torres Yzabal, also co-author with an American of an excellent Mexican cookbook, The Mexican Gourmet (1995), as well as mentor to the Englishwoman Diana Kennedy who has lived in Mexico for decades. In the United States, Diana Kennedy’s Mexican cookbooks are seen as authoritative.

If women like Susanna Palazuelos and María Dolores Torres Yzabal, part of a group that pioneered the recognition of Mexican cuisine, did not cook Mexican at home, where did these recipes come from?

All sorts of places, is the answer, including the servants in the kitchen, friends and neighbors. Perhaps most important was the long tradition of Mexican cookbooks from those that asserted Mexican independence such as the three-volume El cocinero mexicano (1830) to the extraordinary outpouring of cookbooks by Josefina Velázquez de León in the 1930s to 1960s.

It was to this tradition that I assume highly educated women like Susanna Palazuelos and María Dolores Torres Yzabal turned and quite rightly so. I’ve always thought one day I would track down the sources of their recipes. Plagiarism, no. A continuing tradition, yes.

I assume that Susanna Palazuelos was delighted to have both to have Marilyn help her negotiate American publishing which is very different from Mexican, and to have her thoughts on how to translate Mexican practice into recipes for Americans.

For her part, by partnering with Susanna, Marilyn acquired authority and authenticity, as well as access and ideas for her tours.

I am not telling this story to criticize any of the authors involved. Cross-cultural work is not easy. Almost always it involves translators who can bridge the two cultures. Middlemen are as important in cross-cultural cuisine as in any other transaction.

Yet in the past half century the English-language cookbook purporting to represent the authentic cuisine of a foreign culture has become a highly stylized artifact with all sorts of half-hidden rules and assumptions.

Among them are that a single individual can carry out the translation required. It can happen but it’s the exception. That the translation goes direct from the home kitchen to the foreign-language book with no in between. That the foreign cuisine is unchanging, frozen in time, pure, and isolated from all other cuisines.  

Nothing could be further from reality.


This post is prompted by a story about cookbook plagiarism that is rocking the English culinary world. James Hansen wrote it up In Eater.

Miranda Brown, whose thought a lot about the movement of food and cross-cultural interactions and who found Hansen’s piece nuanced, nonetheless found the expectations surrounding the scandal to rant on Facebook and Twitter.

My latest twitter rant… seriously, we need ASIAN 258 indoctrination. I am going to comb through my book to ensure that there are no recipes from my mom’s kitchen….

TWITTER.COM

Miranda Brown 董慕達 on Twitter

“Watching this story develop w/distress. Plagiarism always bad. But so too is reducing #nonwhite #chefs to mere sources of #authentic #experience. Also object (for obv reasons) to erasing #mixedrace chefs in this Manichean discourse that pits West (white) against “the rest” https://t.co/JLruxYTJcs…

_______________

As for my thoughts on the scandal, it looks as though there are passages in the book in question that would count as plagiarism in an undergraduate class. What a pity the conventions of originality in cookbook writing meant that the author could not simply quote and acknowledge what she owed to others.

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6 thoughts on “A Small Cautionary Tale about Cookbooks and Authenticity

  1. waltzingaustralia

    One might ask if it is possible to do anything authentic without copying someone. Or, as the old story goes, there is a fine line between research and plagiarism.

    But focusing on plagiarism, having spent many years in a position to hire academic writers, it was stunning to see how the increased use of technology led to greater and greater incidence of plagiarism — because copy and paste doesn’t even add in the possibility of the slight changes introduced by a typo. So while this is not the same as the innocent plagiarism mentioned above, it does underscore the importance of using caution, as you suggest.

    As always, an interesting and thought-provoking post.

    1. Rachel Laudan Post author

      Yes, and in the case in question much of the plagiarism seems to have been from the headnotes. It would have been so much better to just start from scratch and write her own.

  2. Linda Makris

    As a American crosscultural middleperson translator./writer for a wellknown Greek cookbook author and tv personality, your post is very close to my heart. I fell into my job over 25 years ago feeling totally unqualified and unprepared. Having myself taught simple Greek cooking to expats in Athens during the 90s, I always used my own recipes or those taught to me by my inlaws who ran a traditional taverna until the early 70s. When I copied a recipe from a book, I always made sure to credit the original writer. I always tried to give the ladies an idea of how Greeks cooked in villages, the regions they came from, etc. as a opposed to modern Greek cookery which was rapidly transforming at the time. I did this as a hobby mostly, but I also learned a lot about other cuisines from my ladies who hailed from America to Japan to New Zealand. At the same time I began writing a Greek food history column for an English language newspaper. I could go on, but found your post most interesting. I am still trying to find a publisher for my book on food in Greek myth and history which includes a few recipes. All in all, a hobby turned into a fascinating journey into cross cultural cuisine. Thankyou Rachel.

    1. Rachel Laudan Post author

      Thanks Linda. Love hearing all these stories from people who have actual experience explaining cuisines across cultures. Hope you find a publisher soon. It’s a fascinating subject.

  3. Nancy Harnon Jenkins

    As the writer of several food books that purport to translate various Mediterranean culinary traditions for a broad anglophone audience, I’m very sensitive to what you’re saying, Rachel. I hope I’ve accurately acknowledged any borrowings from previously published works and at the same time been quick to credit sources among the many cooks who have helped me understand those traditions. Like many recipe writers, unless I’m crediting a single source, I tend to look at many different sources, including practicing cooks as well as written materials, and then develop my own interpretation of a dish. This is often difficult in traditional kitchens where one cook’s only, singular, unique, and authentic way of doing things is another cook’s utter aberration and abomination. It leads to interesting experiences–and experiments. Thank you for your generosity to the women named in your piece who seem to be mostly innocent of anything more than the aim of making their traditions better known.

    1. Rachel Laudan Post author

      All that, Nancy, and when all that is done you still have to present it in a form that is both appealing and understandable to an American audience. Quite a task.

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