The Taste of Nostalgia

Women, Race, and Culinary Longing in Peru

By Amy Cox Hall

University of Texas Press

An exploration of gender, race, and food in Peru in the 1950s and 1960s and today.

From the late 1940s to the mid 1960s, Peru’s rapid industrialization and anti-communist authoritarianism coincided with the rise of mass-produced cookbooks, the first televised cooking shows, glossy lifestyle magazines, and imported domestic appliances and foodstuffs. Amy Cox Hall’s The Taste of Nostalgia uses taste as a thematic and analytic thread to examine the ways that women, race, and the kitchen were foundational to Peruvian longings for modernity, both during the Cold War and today.

Drawing on interviews, personal stories, media images, and archival and ethnographic research, Cox Hall considers how elite, European-descended women and the urban home were central to Peru’s modernizing project and finds that all women who labored within the deeply racialized and gendered world of food helped set the stage for a Peruvian food nationalism that is now global in the twenty-first century. Cox Hall skillfully connects how the sometimes-unsavory tastes of the past are served again in today’s profitable and pervasive gastronostalgia that helps sell Peru and its cuisine both at home and abroad.

Amy Cox Hall serves up a compelling counternarrative to that of the celebrated male chefs who have made Peru a global culinary destination in recent decades. She presents the fascinating stories of unheralded women cookbook authors, creators of cooking schools and TV shows, and others who preceded those chefs in the mid-twentieth century. In so doing, she makes a brilliant case for recognizing the powerful entanglements of gender, race, food, and nation in modernizing Peru. Florence E. Babb, UNC, author of Women's Place in the Andes: Engaging Decolonial Feminist Anthropology

The Taste of Nostalgia is exceptional. Clearly and beautifully written, Amy Cox Hall has grounded her study in long-term, ethical, and engaged ethnographic and archival research. It offers a significant contribution to scholarly work on food, gender, and race in Peru. It also offers a powerful corrective to dominant narratives about food and cuisine in Peru. This book draws you in, holds on, and does not let go. María Elena García, University of Washington, author of Gastropolitics and the Specter of Race: Stories of Capital, Culture, and Coloniality in Peru

Amy Cox Hall is a writer and cultural anthropologist. She is the author of Framing a Lost City: Science, Photography and the Making of Machu Picchu and an editor of The Camera as Actor: Photography and the Embodiment of Technology.