Bio

Daniela Gutiérrez Flores is Assistant Professor at the University of California, Davis. She is currently working on a book project titled A Century of Cooks: The Birth of Modern Cooking, which investigates the emergence of cooking as a socially respectable and culturally valuable occupation. Her work has been supported by the Getty Research Institute, the John Carter Brown Library, the Mellon Foundation, among others. She currently leads the Sawyer Seminar Thinking Food at the Intersections, a public humanities project exploring the meanings of food justice through art, activism and scholarship.

Project

Daniela Gutiérrez is going to present a paper titled "The Politics of Cooking: Making Modern Cuisine in Llibre del Coch" and discuss it with her colleagues. Scholarly interest on Mestre Robert’s Llibre del coch has highlighted its role in the history of Catalan and Iberian cuisine, often focusing on specific dishes and their connections to Medieval manuscript recipe-books. Little attention has been paid to how the book fits into the larger print culture of Humanism's revalorization of practical knowledge. As the first ever printed cookbook in the Iberian peninsula, Llibre del Coch is a fundamental document to understand how cooking evolved from a historically undervalued activity into an occupation capable of generating social and cultural capital. Through a comparative analysis of the materiality of the cookbook's editions, and approaching it as a political artifact, this presentation argues that Llibre del Coch laid out the principles of modern cooking, thus planting the seeds for the later emergence of the chef.