Gastronomic Inventions and the Aesthetics of Regional Food: The Naturalization of Yucatecan Taste

Abstract

My main goal here is to describe and explain the processes whereby the taste resulting from a particular assemblage of ingredients, recipes, and eating etiquette, has become associated in the local and national imagination with a specific regional culture and territory within the Mexican state. I argue that there is a specific, historically constructed aesthetic configuration of flavors, aromas, textures, and colors that make the food of Yucatán recognizable within and beyond the penin-sular territory I propose that the taste of Yucatecan food is opposed, as a regional identity marker, to a perceived monolithic taste of national Mexican cuisine. Even acknowledging that since 2010 Yucatán s food has become progressively coopted by Mexican national chefs and culture brokers (see Ayora-Diaz in press), I suggest that the process of invention of Yucatecan gastronomy can be understood as the emergence of a food'tradition …