Acceso usuarios
Amy Cox Hall
This article examines one recent example of nation-making around food to investigate the ways in which eating and heritage are connected to national imaginaries of fusion and mestizaje in Peru. In 2012, the world-renowned chef Gastón Acurio relied on a copy of the 1947 cookbook Cocina y reposteria: viandas tipicamente limeñas y de origen europeo, peruanizadas by ‘la negra Francisca Baylón’ to develop a thematic series in his popular cooking show Aventura Culinaria. In the series’ episodes, he showcased the long-standing importance of Peruvian cooking as emblematic of Peru’s cultural mestizaje or mixing, while simultaneously considering the recipes a foundation through which to invent new and more cosmopolitan dishes, fusing them with international flavours and spices. As it turned out, however, Baylón was not the famed African-Peruvian Acurio thought but rather a character invented by a middle-class limeña housewife whose grandparents had emigrated from Italy. This paper demonstrates that an elite desire for an authentic food heritage depends on a globalized future while simultaneously ignoring the racial and gendered stratifications of Peru’s food history. In prospecting the past for potential riches, racial and gender inequalities are sublimated in an aesthetic of taste grounded in the desire for a modern nation.
