Historians have recently shown a growing interest in the national integration that followed the Mexican Revolution. As a contribution to this rich literature, Jeffrey Pilcher uses nineteenth- and twentieth-century cookbooks, the archives of various state agencies (including the Department of Health), and an array of secondary literature to explore how cultural and political factors affected eating habits. The emergence of a national cuisine, he argues, should be understood as part of the larger process of national integration, one intimately tied to gender, modernization, and a developing middle class. Culinary historians and lovers of Mexican food will take great interest in Pilcher’s histories of particular dishes and his genealogy of cookbooks. Historians concerned with culture, politics, gender, or race will also find it interesting, but may be frustrated by some of the book’s shortcomings.

The book opens with a discussion of the importance of food in preconquest Mexican society, followed by an argument that eating habits changed little during the colonial period as whites and Indians remained mutually suspicious of each other’s cuisine. The third chapter traces the emergence of nationalist Mexican cookbooks and shifting attitudes toward Indian foods. Chapter 4 examines the turn-of-the-century científico debate that linked a wheat diet with industrial development. The fifth chapter, perhaps the best in the book, deals with the connection between new food technology and local political struggles. It also traces the rise of mass-marketed junk food and its affects on Mexican diets. Chapter 6 argues that it was only with the demise of Cardenismo after 1940 that certain types of dishes could emerge as distinctly Mexican. The book concludes with a discussion of cuisine throughout the world, and with a final recognition of the survival of a distinctly Mexican cuisine.

The book successfully demonstrates that the emergence of a national cuisine was tied to other shifts in Mexican society, but the chapters are unevenly integrated into the main argument and many claims are undermined by uncritical readings of primary sources and overreliance on secondary literature and anecdotal evidence. Moreover, Pilcher uses sources from the 1920s to support discussions of post-World War II cultural attitudes, anthropological studies from the 1950s to make a case for mid-nineteenth-century subversion of patriarchy, and personal experience from the 1990s to explain preconquest eating habits. Problematic gender analysis and poorly developed ideas of political subversion compound such shortcomings. These kinds of problems are frustrating considering the high quality of recent studies treating the intersections between culture and politics.

Unsubstantiated assertions further detract from the power of Pilcher’s arguments. Readers may be jarred, for example, by unsupported claims that preconquest “women were cooks who derived much of their self-worth from skill at the metate” (p. 34), or that the “national community” created by women through the sharing of recipes and reading of cookbooks provided a viable alternative to the “alien political entity formulated by men” (p. 67). Also, tangential discussions of early modern European society, Thai culinary traditions, and Egyptian ideas of the sacred sidetrack Pilcher’s interesting analysis of how certain foods were canonized as national cuisine. Cross-cultural comparisons can serve as a rich way of deparochializing one’s analysis, but only when they deepen our understanding of a particular case.

Though Pilcher’s effort to relate cuisine to broader conceptual issues has problems, his book is important and suggestive. It deserves attention from scholars interested in the study of the intersections of popular culture and politics, and those interested in how quotidian experiences shape national identities.