Historic Mexican recipes now available as e-books

In February we reported how the University of Texas in San Antonio was in the process of digitizing hundreds of historical Mexican cookbooks. The pandemic has delayed this effort, but instead of just putting the whole project on hold, the university is now releasing recipes from the collection as free e-books.

The first mini-cookbook was released earlier this month. Postres: Guardando Lo Mejor Para el Principio, or “Desserts: Saving the Best for First,” contains recipes in both English and Spanish that come from generations of Mexican cooks. The entire e-book series, titled Recetas: Cocinando en los Tiempos del Coronavirus/Cooking in the Time of Coronavirus, is the result of years of work by the UTSA Libraries Special Collections. According to librarian Stephanie Noell, these e-books are a way to keep people informed about the project while it is on hiatus. “People can’t come in to look at the cookbooks, and we’re limited in the number of cookbooks we had scanned, so we just wanted to provide people with another way to access them,” she told Gastro Obscura.

As an added feature, the e-books contain scans of the original documents that appear alongside the transcribed recipes. USTA plans to release the second cookbook on main courses later this year, with a volume on appetizers and drinks to follow in 2021. You can download the complete first release on the UTSA Libraries website.