Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, perhaps the most famous Mexican nun.
One of the things I’ve learned in my Mexican History and Gastronomy program is that to understand Mexican cuisine, you really have to know what was happening in the convents during the viceregal period. The viceregal period refers to when Mexico was ruled by the Spanish crown, from 1521 to 1821.
Yesterday Edmundo gave us a fascinating lecture on what life must have been like for the nuns back then. I didn’t realize the extent that money and class determined the course of their lives.
The first convents in Mexico were segregated. If you were poor and indigenous, you couldn’t enter, except as a servant. Even women from good families might not have been able to afford it — the convent required a dowry, and women who didn’t have one needed a rich benefactor. The rich benefactors preferred light-skinned, virtuous women.
Young women who were about to “take the habits” (the literal translation from Spanish for taking a nun’s oath) had lavish, three-day parties where they paraded around town in jewels and fancy clothes. Families even paid for portraits of these women, as a sort of “before the convent” photo. One of these portraits is hanging in the Frida Kahlo Museum, near the kitchen; a few more are at the wonderful Franz Mayer museum.
If you were a lower-caste woman without means, you had to find a husband, become a servant, or become a prostitute. One Mexican convent, Jesus María, was specifically founded to help prevent women from entering into prostitution, Edmundo said. The Franz Mayer Museum building, which lies just north of the Alameda Central, used to be a hospital exclusively served prostitutes, so this was a very real possibility for women back then.
Even though a woman would’ve paid money to enter the convent, life there wasn’t easy. One historical report that Edmundo read to us last night had the women waking up at 4 a.m. to pray. And there would’ve been various power struggles and scandals that come with sharing the same space with the same women, day after day.
Once enclosed in the convents, the nuns used food as a way to make money — several of their sweets live on today at Dulcería Celaya in the Centro Histórico. But eating was also a way to grow closer to God. These were not simple dishes. Can you imagine that first taste of a hand-ground, creamy walnut sauce, or a manchamanteles spliced with tomatoes and fruit? It had to lift them to the heavens. Heck, it lifts me to the heavens and I’m not living a cloistered existence.
I bought a book of Sor Juana’s recipes at Ghandi yesterday, and I’m excited to check them out and possibly make a few. When I do, I’ll be grateful that I live in 2011 with the freedom to both work and cook.