The Imprenta de Jose Cabrera on Calle San Francisco in Guadalajara took the order for the first edition of Nuevo Cocinero Mexicano on June 14, 1893. The print run was 800 copies. The author, Vicenta Torres Rubio de Mendiola, paid the cost herself, in three installments, the last of which she completed in October.
She was forty-six years old. Her husband, the engineer Ramon Mendiola, had died of typhus in 1889. She had three daughters, aged nineteen, fifteen, and eleven, and she had been working since her husband's death as a cooking instructor in the kitchens of three prosperous Guadalajara families.
Her cookbook ran to 312 pages. It contained 487 recipes. It was bound in plain dark green cloth with the title stamped in gold on the spine.
It was not the first cookbook published in Mexico. The historian Sarah Bak-Geller Corona, who has done the most thorough archival work on early Mexican culinary publishing, traces the printed Mexican cookbook tradition to the Cocinero Mexicano of 1831, an anonymous work issued by the Galvan press in Mexico City. Several subsequent cookbooks appeared through the middle of the nineteenth century. All were anonymous, or published under pseudonyms, or attributed to men.
Torres's book was the first to appear with a woman's full name on the title page, sold commercially, in a print run intended for the open market.
The distinction matters because of what it required. Bak-Geller Corona, writing in Estudios de Historia Moderna y Contemporanea in 2013, noted that the gendered economy of nineteenth-century Mexican publishing assumed that the named author of a printed book was male, and that the named female author was therefore an anomaly requiring deliberate construction.
Torres constructed it.
She wrote a preface, two pages long, in which she explained that the recipes had been collected over twenty-five years from her own kitchen, from her mother's kitchen in Aguascalientes, and from the kitchens of the families for whom she had cooked. She named several of those families. She named her mother. She named, in the dedication, her three daughters.
“She named, in the dedication, her three daughters.”
She did not name her late husband.
The omission has been read various ways. The historian Jeffrey Pilcher, in his 1998 study of Mexican food and identity, called it a quiet refusal of the inherited frame. The historian Sandra Aguilar-Rodriguez, in a 2011 essay, called it simply the truth of the book's authorship.
The recipes themselves are a particular record. Bak-Geller Corona's analysis identifies 312 dishes from central-western Mexico, 89 dishes from the Bajio and Aguascalientes, 41 dishes coded as French or Italian by Torres, and 45 dishes Torres labels as de las casas, from the houses, by which she meant the specific households where she had worked.
Several of the household recipes are attributed by initials. There is a chile relleno al estilo de la Sra. M. de A. There is a flan como lo hace D. de C. There is a soup of squash blossoms de la cocina de la Sra. P. de la T. Bak-Geller Corona has identified all three families from contemporary Guadalajara records.
The book sold. The first edition was exhausted by March 1894. Torres ordered a second printing of 1,200 copies that spring, and a third of 2,000 in 1896. By the time of her death in 1908, six editions had been printed, totaling something close to 14,000 copies.
She made money. The historian Aguilar-Rodriguez has estimated, from surviving banking records of the Banco de Jalisco, that Torres's royalties on the cookbook between 1893 and 1905 totaled approximately 3,800 pesos. This was not a fortune but it was, for a widow with three daughters in provincial Mexico, a livelihood.
Her daughters did not, as far as the record shows, follow her into cooking instruction. The eldest, Maria Vicenta, married a Guadalajara lawyer in 1896 and bore four children. The middle daughter, Carmen, became a schoolteacher and taught in Zapopan for thirty-one years. The youngest, Dolores, never married, and lived with her mother until her mother's death.
Dolores inherited the rights to the cookbook. She did not commission a seventh edition. She is recorded in the 1910 census as living in a smaller house on the outskirts of the city, with no occupation listed, and in the 1921 census she is not listed at all.
The book itself stayed in print, through a different publisher, into the 1920s. After that it disappeared from active circulation. By the time the historian Salvador Novo turned his attention to Mexican culinary history in the 1960s, the Torres cookbook was already a rarity. Novo did not mention her by name in his published work.
She was recovered, in the scholarly sense, in the 1990s and 2000s, primarily through the work of Bak-Geller Corona, Pilcher, and Aguilar-Rodriguez. A facsimile edition of the 1893 first printing was published by the Universidad de Guadalajara in 2003.
The original print run is now exceedingly rare. Copies are held at the Biblioteca Nacional in Mexico City, at the Biblioteca Publica del Estado de Jalisco in Guadalajara, and at the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin. A private collector in Monterrey is known to hold a copy of the 1896 edition.
What is most striking about Torres's cookbook, read now, is not its modesty but its confidence. The preface does not apologize for itself. The recipes are not hedged. The naming of the houses, by initials but specifically, is not the act of a woman uncertain of her standing.
She knew the kitchens of her city. She had worked in them, she had taught in them, she had earned in them. The book recorded what she knew and put her name on what she had recorded.
The historian Pilcher, near the end of his 1998 study, observed that culinary traditions in Mexico were largely transmitted orally by women and largely written down by men, and that the gap between the two transmissions was where most of the actual knowledge was lost. Vicenta Torres closed that gap, in 1893, with a green cloth book and 800 copies and her own full name on the title page. The book is still there. The print run sold out.
