A treasure trove of rare and historical Mexican cookbooks is now available online

The history of Mexican cuisine involves adaptation, conquest, and assimilation. One way to trace this story is through cookbooks. While not many exist from the earliest interactions between Europeans and Native Americans, a collection of cookbooks at University of Texas at San Antonio provides a rough timeline of the transformation from native dishes to the today’s cuisine that combines American crops with European, mainly Spanish, traditions and foods.

Last year we reported on Diana Kennedy’s books going to this collection, but a new development brought the trove of books to our attention again. The university has stepped up its efforts to digitize the cookbooks, and many of the oldest and rarest books are now available online to anyone who wants to view them.

The repository at UTSA began in 2001 with a donation of approximately 550 books from San Antonio resident Laurie Gruenbeck. It now has more than 2,000 books, including Diana Kennedy’s rarest books and personal papers. The earliest book in the collection dates to 1789, making it one of the oldest Mexican cookbooks in existence. It is a “manuscript cookbook”, meaning it is a handwritten recipe collection in a notebook, penned by someone who used it in their day to day cooking. Its stained and doodled pages provide insight into how regular people ate during the late 18th century. There are approximately 100 of these notebooks in the USTA collection, and about half of these are among the digitized books.

You can trace the origins of many of today’s popular foods in the 1789 book, which includes ingredients like raisins, almonds, cloves, and cinnamon – things we associated with mole, for one example. These rare books are not only scanned, they are also transcribed, so the contents are searchable. The university is continuing to add to the online documents, and anyone is welcome to visit the collection in San Antonio.