Daniela Gutiérrez Flores

A Century of Cooks: The Birth of Modern Cooking and the Making of the Spanish Empire

A Century of Cooks argues that the kitchen was a primary site where the Spanish Empire’s ideological order was both constructed and contested. Drawing on the Humanist revaluation of practical knowledge, elite male cooks claimed ingenio—the intellectual capacity for creativity and inventiveness—transforming cooking into a new form of literacy grounded in material and embodied mastery, and engagement with print culture. Yet this elevation depended on, and actively produced, a hierarchy that rendered the culinary labor of women, enslaved individuals, racialized people, and the underclasses as menial, uncreative, and invisible. The book traces the tensions this contradiction generated, showing how the underclasses across Spanish territories re-signified cooking into a means of devotion, social dissent, community-building, and care. By situating the rise of the professional cook within this broader politics of stratification, A Century of Cooks approaches culinary labor not as a profession, but as an epistemological site where the foundational operations of empire were enacted in one of the most fundamental of human practices: the making of food.

Daniela Gutiérrez Flores (Assistant Professor of Spanish, University of California, Davis) is a scholar of early modern Spanish and colonial Latin American literature with research interests in labor, food history, history of the senses, critical race studies and gender studies. Her research has been supported by the Getty Foundation, the John Carter Brown Library, the Mellon Foundation, the UC Humanities Research Institute, among others.

She is an active collaborator of the podcast Esculent, a public humanities initiative that investigates how humans have defined edibility. Daniela holds a PhD in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Studies from the University of Chicago.