Puerto Rico’s Cook Books: Recipes of a History

Summary

Puerto Rico’s history is a blend of the different ethnicities that settled in the island after the Spanish Conquest. This ethnogenesis can be studied through the culinary traditions that conform what we now refer to as criollo. Using the works of Mary C. Beaudry and Elizabeth M. Scott as a sounding board, this research consists of two parts. First, an analysis of cooking books available in Puerto Rico during the 19th century in order to establish the different methods and tools available at the time.  Second, the artefactual collection from Ballajá, a neighborhood located in Old San Juan during the 18th and 19th centuries extensively excavated during the 1990s, will be used to compare and contrast the information obtained in the books and what is actually recovered in an archaeological site. This paper will present the preliminary findings of a research that aims to establish Puerto Rico’s culinary traditions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2016   •
• Current Multidisciplinary Research Approaches in Historical Archaeology

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 844