March 2, 2023 • 22 mins
Eva and Maite celebrate Women's History Month by diving into the past to explore two Latinas from California who revolutionized cookbooks - Encarnación Pinedo and Elena Zelayeta. Plus, Chef Claudette Zepeda of Top Chef fame sends us a message!
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
My name is Eva Longoria and I am and welcome
to Hungry for History, a podcast that explores our past
and present through food. On every episode, we'll talk about
the history of some of our favorite dishes, ingredients, and beverages.
So make yourself at home, eh, Rachel. This is an
(00:28):
exciting episode because it's Women's History Month, which could be
every month of the year. Yes, I agree, I agree.
You and I are always talking about amazing women. Yes,
you're one of bab you're one of them banks. I
don't know, but yes, I love talking about women, celebrating women,
(00:49):
and talking about cookbooks. I'm obsessed with talking about cookbooks,
especially she is she is, she is every time I
come over, I'm like carrying million books. Um, but there's
so many ones, you know, cookbooks written by little known women,
and I love to highlight these. And one of the
(01:09):
women that we're talking about today I learned from you,
and so I'm excited to talk about her, and I'm
excited to talk about an And we just did a
TEXTBACS episode and both of these women are have a
foreign MX. So oh so we're Chicanas before the term Chicana.
(01:34):
I mean, we're going away back yeah, yeah, we're going
away like eighteen ninety eight, ninety eight. I love talking
about cookbooks, and so I'm excited to dive into these
amazing women, um, these powerhouse Latinas in the eighteen hundreds
who were really revolutionary one hundred percent. I first want
(02:00):
to talk about who was born right when California became
part of the US. So she was living in this
in this world, this sort of in between world. But
she in eighteen ninety eight, when she was fifty years old,
she became the first lepina to write a Spanish language cookbook.
(02:27):
What's interesting about Incarnacion, which is such a beautiful name,
like one of those beautiful names she was born. She
was born into an elite family. But during this time
where California was quote unquote sold to the United States
after the Mexican American War, they lost their land. They did.
(02:51):
They lost her land. Her grandfather and her uncles were killed.
Their ranch has taken. I mean, this was the story
of so many people during this time period. And they
were these elite educated people who all of a sudden
became second class citizens in their own home and all
(03:12):
of a sudden had nothing. I mean, they were from
Santa Clara in northern California. Their family had the first
house in that area. She was fifty years old, was
unmarried woman, very well educated her father. Before her father died,
she begged her mother to give her daughters a very
(03:33):
good education. And we know about this from this book.
She wrote up the book for her nieces, her sister.
One of her sister had married an Anglo, and she
was afraid that her nieces were going to forget who
they were because their father was white. So she did
(03:55):
not want then to lose their roots and lose a
sense of who they were. Oh, so she decided to
write this cookbook and calls it the Spanish Cook, not
the Mexican Cook, the Spanish Cook. That's not surprising because
I think, you know, with the new Anglo majority in
California at this time, to be called a Mexican was
(04:18):
pretty derogatory. So a lot of these elite Californios always
called themselves Spanish, which is not wrong, by the way,
because at this time, you know, a lot of those
old Spanish families never intermarried with indigenous people or Mexicans,
and so, you know, I do think though some of
(04:39):
it was about like, oh, we don't want to have
the label of Mexicans. Let's call ourselves Spanish, yes, exactly.
And this is something that sort of stuck up even today.
You know, sometimes we refer to the rad rice as
Spanish rice. I don't know why it's called Spanish rice,
because nobody in Spain eats the red rice. Now, I
mean baya is red, but that's from saffron. It's a
(05:01):
totally different thing. It's more using the term Spanish, like
to his Spanish size these these things. So it becomes
a sort of very very confusing, and it kind of
starts within what are the recipes? What are the recipes
in it? Like, what are some of the dishes? She
(05:21):
has about eight hundred dishes. One thing that's interesting is
that fifteen percent of the recipes come from UM Michicano,
which is the earliest cookbook published in Mexico. So fifteen
percent of the recipes are from this cookbook UM. But
she has about eight hundred recipes. Oh my god, I
know it's it's it's a proper it's a proper cookbook,
(05:44):
like a full on cookbook. She has tons of chi
lessons of spices, vinegar, wine, m she has three different
recipes for chi laki les. She has fourteen recipes for tensis,
were teen recipes for chila. How many ways can you
make chili? You could do you could do meet, you
(06:08):
could do cheese, you could do vegetables, different sun size,
different cheeses. UM ten of recipes for codfish, including the
bacca now, the Christmas baccan now. And she has fifty
seven different size sas fifty fun sizes. This is all
in one book. This is all in one book. Yeah,
(06:28):
this is all in one book. And so was she
the first Spanish cookbook in the US or there was
a couple others before hers? This is the first Spanish
language cookbook in the US. There were other Spanish sort
of Mexican cookbooks that had been printed in Mexico that
were then printed in the US and more in the
East Coast. And then there were other recipes like UM
(06:52):
Junior League sort of little cookbooks that were published by churches,
and they included some Mexican recipes that were attributed to
the housekeepers of the women that we're writing this cookbook.
But this is the fall on first Spanish language cookbook
published by a woman. Wow, what I love that UM
in the cookbook. She assumed the readers knew how to cook,
(07:16):
so a lot of the directions were like, and make
it in the usual manner. Do you imagine reading a
cookbook today, going and you know, salte those mushrooms in
the usual way. Yeah, the way that you do. Don't
go anywhere. Hungry for history will be right back. Welcome
(07:38):
back to the show. Here's more on the first Latina
to publish a Spanish language cookbook in the United States.
She leaves this heirloom to her nieces, and she says,
you should consider your needs because if a woman is rich,
she needs to manage, and if she is poor, she
(08:01):
needs to know how to work. So she's giving this,
but she cites these ancient Roman you know, cookbooks, and
she cites these ancient Persian parties and and I mean,
she was clearly an incredibly educated woman that decided to
do this, and this is you know, food as this
badge of identity, and she wanted her nieces to keep this.
(08:24):
And then when she died, the book fell into obscurity
like many things do that were at the time. You
know that we're published by women, by latinas it should
have fell into obscurity. I know in La there are
at least two copies of this book, the Huntington Library
and Pasadena has one in the LA Public Library Downtown
(08:44):
also has a copy. Wow, she was like the first
Martha Stewart also because she gave like, um, tips about
you know, outside of the cooking knowledge. She gave tips
like kitchen cleanliness the cardinal virtue of every cook or
select your ingredients carefully and know what your animals were fed. Um.
(09:08):
I mean she had a lot of like these amazing consejos,
what do you advices, a lot of different a lot
of advice. Yes, you know, even like you know, mushrooms,
like make sure that you if your mushrooms tripped yellow,
they're poisonous. If they're black, they're God. Yeah, so I
guess we could, Yeah, we could call her an early
and early Martha Stewart, early Martha Stewart. Do you have
(09:29):
this cookbook? Do you have it? I don't have the
actual cookbook, but I have this book. It's called In
Garnacion's Kitchen, and this was published in the early two thousands.
So's here she is. There's look at her, Oh my god,
look at her. I know she's beautiful, but this like
a very very fluffy dress. This is clearly that's a
(09:50):
very Spanish Spanish dress. That's a very Spanish attire. But
this is called in Garnessian's Kitchen Mexican Recipes from nineteenth
century California. So this is the book that I have.
And she was amazing. She also used to write for
newspaper columns. I mean, she was an incredible, incredible woman.
(10:15):
So what about Elena Zela Yetta. I told you about
her because somebody sent me a script about her life.
She was a celebrity chef before celebrity chefs existed. Her
life is fascinating, her life is amazing. When you told
me about her, I was like, how do I not
know about this woman? And I now I have like
all of her books. You know, she was up an
(10:39):
absolute force. And Lena was born in Mexico. Her parents
were Spanish from Barcelona and moved to Mexico and that
at the end of the nineteenth century, you know, to
make it in America, write for better opportunities. They were
not a well to do family at all. She was
(11:00):
born after her parents had been in Mexico for about
a year and a half at the beginning of the
Mexican Revolution, people were targeting Spaniards. They weren't wealthy Spaniards,
they just happened to be Spaniards. So they left Mexico
and moved to San Francisco. So she was she was
eleven years old when the family moved to San Francisco,
(11:21):
right before the revolution broke out. Well, what I love
about Elena, Like you know, she did speak English. She
was obsessed with cooking though and learning new dishes, and
she created a restaurant out of her home and it
was pretty successful. But she didn't have like the best
(11:41):
husband at the time, so she had kicked him out
and then she let him back in and she kind of,
you know, was this force of a woman in the household.
Like she was. She was a mom and she was
a wife, and she was also super entrepreneurial. She was
incredible at One thing that happened is that when she
(12:03):
was pregnant with her second child, with her second son,
she went blunt, like almost immediately went blunt and yeah.
And then she of course as she went into this deep,
deep depression and she left to cook. Like you said,
she had this very successful restaurant from her home and
she actually wrote her first cookbook. She was encouraged to
(12:23):
write her first cookbook. She didn't want to do it,
but she only agreed to do it so that she
could buy Seeing Eye Dog. So she wrote a cookbook
to get enough money to buy the dog. And then
what I find fascinating about Elena was her career took
off after losing her sight. Is czy, that's crazy, it's
(12:45):
mind blowing. Yes, after losing her sight is when she
agreed to write the first cookbook to buy Thing Eye Dog,
and she ended up selling ninety thousand copies. And then
she went on to you know, five different cookbooks. She
wrote an autobiography as well, and she was a teacher.
(13:06):
She had a pooking show, Yeah, she did. This is
what was fascinating to me was this story that I
told you about because she was the first woman, or
one of the first people to have a cooking show
on TV and she was blind and the audience didn't
believe it because she had strings attached to her ankles
(13:30):
to alert her to witch camera to look towards and
she would set out all the bowls in front of her.
And if you see a footage of this show, you
can see how she touches the brim of the bowl
and she kind of feels the ingredient in the bowl,
like and then you take your flower and she's kind
of double checking if she's touching the flower. But it's
(13:52):
really remarkable that she was a woman. She was a Latina,
she was blind, and she had a cooking show. It's crazy.
She had her son was in her show with her
as well, so he's sort of handing her things and
you can't tell because she looks at the camera based
like you said it based on web ankle what what?
What is stragas being pulled and she's really engaging with
(14:14):
the with the viewer. Yeah, she was, you know, a powerhouse.
She also had a frozen food business. Oh my god,
what I don't know that she had a frozen food
business and Lena's food specialty. She sold frozen thirtia said chiladas,
a mans and and she run this speciess with her
two sons. Her husband died tragically, um, even before all
(14:37):
of this started really happening. Yeah when also she had
she had a lot of hardship in her life. I
mean she was blind and then her husband was tragically killed,
um in a car accident. And despite all that, you see,
like the forward in her book by her friend, and
like newspaper articles that her life view or her outlook
(14:59):
in life was so awe inspiring. Like she she the
foreward in her book by Helen Brown was to know
z or to know easy is to have a favorite friend,
to know as a very special person. That she had
quick wit. She had thousands of friends. I wish I
could invite her to a dinner party. And they used
(15:19):
to say, she wrote this book in Nnaza Fiesta recipes,
the party recipes, this is the one that was The
foreward is by Helen Evans Brown, who was a powerhouse
in her own right. I mean she's known as the
sort of mother of California cooking. They were good friends,
and she said an e mail out and Lennaz is
a party. I love that. Every male is going to
(15:40):
be a party. She was not a fussy cook. She
was just fun. She was just nice. Um yeah, everybody,
everybody loved her. I love this, like you said, this,
this outlook on life, this view of life, it was
just so positive. I love. Also in her cookbooks, she
(16:03):
really made a point to differentiate Mexican cooking from Spanish
cooking and how it was very different, and so she
was like, well, you know, massa is not used in Spain.
Spain uses olive oil and saffron, and Mexican recipes can
be subtle, not everything is hot. But like she really
made clarifications between Spanish food and Mexican food. Absolutely, And
(16:27):
she does that in the first cookbook that she published,
which is the Swan that and in that's famous Mexican
and Spanish recipes. This is the one that she bought
for so that she could buy her Seeing Eye Dog.
And I love that. Different than the Spanish cook that
has Mexican recipes, this one she really breaks down what
is what, which was quite which was quite new, quite
(16:49):
groundbreaking at the time. How many cookbooks does she have?
I think she had five different cookbooks plus an auto
the biography. Yeah. So she died in nineteen seventy four. Wow,
oh year before I was born. What I found so
crazy was in the nineteen seventies her food line supplied
to weight Watchers. She was part of weight Watchers or
(17:10):
food at some point she was part of weight Watchers.
Isn't that crazy? And her granddaughter lives in the Bay
Area and still remembers her grandmother as being just do
this fireball. This is this amazing, amazing woman. And she
always had a lot of a lot of dichos in
her cookbooks. What do you call a lot of proverbs?
(17:32):
Proverbs all of that. Yes, And there's one actually, they
all of her cookbooks. I just opened it up to
this one and there's one proverb right here with a
little illustration. And she always had that. And she and
they said that she always spoke that way. She was
always saying that the chosen people were like, what are
you talking about? Because a lot of them don't really translate.
(17:53):
And it's one of the things that people find so
charming and funny about her. When we come back, award
winning Chef Claudet Sea, a San Diego, California based culinary entrepreneur,
sends us a message welcome back to Hungry for History.
(18:17):
On this very special episode celebrating Women's History Month. We
wanted to feature a female chef making waves in the
culinary world, and who better than Chef Claudet Sea, a
first generation daughter of immigrants who is known for her
fearlessness in the kitchen and beyond. Queenie must Tebela I
(18:40):
am a first generation Mexican American self proclaimed border kid.
I was born in San Diego and raised between Tijuana,
San Diego and Mara. At eighteen, I had my son, James,
and I realized when I looked at him that I
had to figure out what I was going to do
with the rest of my life to provide for him,
and also I follow my passions and my love so
(19:03):
I could tell him follow his And food was it
for me. Food. It brings me the most unadulterated joy
that I've ever had. It brings me a lot of pain,
it brings me a lot of growth, and you know,
twenty two years later, almost twenty three years later, I
can seriously say that there's really nothing else that I'd
rather be doing. Bringing my food, my Mexican food to
(19:29):
Australia was such a such a churning point, such a
point of pride, such an achievement not only for me,
but for the generations before me. And to bring this
a better name to Australia, you know, started off as
a joke and idea. Yeah, I went in. When we
got it off the ground in a month and a half,
(19:50):
and the reception that we received by the people in
Sydney was huge. I didn't know how many. I didn't
realize how many Mexicans were living in Sydne in Australia.
And we did a dinner in September where I went
and we had Mariazi, we had a solo Madriatzi outside.
It was just this really kind of coming of age
(20:11):
for myself in my career and you know, twenty plus
years in twenty two years in like this is something
that I in my wildest dream that my ancestors wildest dreams,
didn't think I'd ever was that it was possible. Didn't
think that I'd achieved, but not because it's not being
willing to take the chances. But I just didn't see
it in my people. You know, I didn't see it
(20:32):
in my surroundings. You know, having lost my father in
twenty twenty two and June, I wish he had been
present for that moment. He always as a child, he
always told me you were going to take a sea
name to the highest places and the highest mountains, and
he always wanted this for me as a child, and
(20:53):
to see it come to life was much more than
open at Ta Kadia in Sydney was really like it
was a transformational breaking of generational curses that I can't
even put into words what that meant to me and
little Claudet. I do think the culinary world is predominantly
(21:17):
male dominated across the world. I walk into kitchens to
this day it was no matter how much I've achieved
and how you know, TV articles, awards, and I'm still
regarded as the lady. Especially in European kitchens, you know
that chef is reserved for a male. So I think
it's definitely room for education in those moments where you can,
(21:40):
you know, tell this chef that maybe's working fifty years
in this industry, that you'd like to be addressed this
chef in a polite way, to draw those boundaries and
tell people how you want to be addressed. Thank you
so much for listening to our Women's History Month episode.
I love that we're celebrating these amazing women. Thank you
(22:02):
so much. Hungry for History is an unbelievable entertainment production
in partnership with Ihearts Michael Tura podcast Network. For more
of your favorite shows, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
My name is Eva Longoria and I am and welcome
to Hungry for History, a podcast that explores our past
and present through food. On every episode, we'll talk about
the history of some of our favorite dishes, ingredients, and beverages.
So make yourself at home, eh, Rachel. This is an
(00:28):
exciting episode because it's Women's History Month, which could be
every month of the year. Yes, I agree, I agree.
You and I are always talking about amazing women. Yes,
you're one of bab you're one of them banks. I
don't know, but yes, I love talking about women, celebrating women,
(00:49):
and talking about cookbooks. I'm obsessed with talking about cookbooks,
especially she is she is, she is every time I
come over, I'm like carrying million books. Um, but there's
so many ones, you know, cookbooks written by little known women,
and I love to highlight these. And one of the
(01:09):
women that we're talking about today I learned from you,
and so I'm excited to talk about her, and I'm
excited to talk about an And we just did a
TEXTBACS episode and both of these women are have a
foreign MX. So oh so we're Chicanas before the term Chicana.
(01:34):
I mean, we're going away back yeah, yeah, we're going
away like eighteen ninety eight, ninety eight. I love talking
about cookbooks, and so I'm excited to dive into these
amazing women, um, these powerhouse Latinas in the eighteen hundreds
who were really revolutionary one hundred percent. I first want
(02:00):
to talk about who was born right when California became
part of the US. So she was living in this
in this world, this sort of in between world. But
she in eighteen ninety eight, when she was fifty years old,
she became the first lepina to write a Spanish language cookbook.
(02:27):
What's interesting about Incarnacion, which is such a beautiful name,
like one of those beautiful names she was born. She
was born into an elite family. But during this time
where California was quote unquote sold to the United States
after the Mexican American War, they lost their land. They did.
(02:51):
They lost her land. Her grandfather and her uncles were killed.
Their ranch has taken. I mean, this was the story
of so many people during this time period. And they
were these elite educated people who all of a sudden
became second class citizens in their own home and all
(03:12):
of a sudden had nothing. I mean, they were from
Santa Clara in northern California. Their family had the first
house in that area. She was fifty years old, was
unmarried woman, very well educated her father. Before her father died,
she begged her mother to give her daughters a very
(03:33):
good education. And we know about this from this book.
She wrote up the book for her nieces, her sister.
One of her sister had married an Anglo, and she
was afraid that her nieces were going to forget who
they were because their father was white. So she did
(03:55):
not want then to lose their roots and lose a
sense of who they were. Oh, so she decided to
write this cookbook and calls it the Spanish Cook, not
the Mexican Cook, the Spanish Cook. That's not surprising because
I think, you know, with the new Anglo majority in
California at this time, to be called a Mexican was
(04:18):
pretty derogatory. So a lot of these elite Californios always
called themselves Spanish, which is not wrong, by the way,
because at this time, you know, a lot of those
old Spanish families never intermarried with indigenous people or Mexicans,
and so, you know, I do think though some of
(04:39):
it was about like, oh, we don't want to have
the label of Mexicans. Let's call ourselves Spanish, yes, exactly.
And this is something that sort of stuck up even today.
You know, sometimes we refer to the rad rice as
Spanish rice. I don't know why it's called Spanish rice,
because nobody in Spain eats the red rice. Now, I
mean baya is red, but that's from saffron. It's a
(05:01):
totally different thing. It's more using the term Spanish, like
to his Spanish size these these things. So it becomes
a sort of very very confusing, and it kind of
starts within what are the recipes? What are the recipes
in it? Like, what are some of the dishes? She
(05:21):
has about eight hundred dishes. One thing that's interesting is
that fifteen percent of the recipes come from UM Michicano,
which is the earliest cookbook published in Mexico. So fifteen
percent of the recipes are from this cookbook UM. But
she has about eight hundred recipes. Oh my god, I
know it's it's it's a proper it's a proper cookbook,
(05:44):
like a full on cookbook. She has tons of chi
lessons of spices, vinegar, wine, m she has three different
recipes for chi laki les. She has fourteen recipes for tensis,
were teen recipes for chila. How many ways can you
make chili? You could do you could do meet, you
(06:08):
could do cheese, you could do vegetables, different sun size,
different cheeses. UM ten of recipes for codfish, including the
bacca now, the Christmas baccan now. And she has fifty
seven different size sas fifty fun sizes. This is all
in one book. This is all in one book. Yeah,
(06:28):
this is all in one book. And so was she
the first Spanish cookbook in the US or there was
a couple others before hers? This is the first Spanish
language cookbook in the US. There were other Spanish sort
of Mexican cookbooks that had been printed in Mexico that
were then printed in the US and more in the
East Coast. And then there were other recipes like UM
(06:52):
Junior League sort of little cookbooks that were published by churches,
and they included some Mexican recipes that were attributed to
the housekeepers of the women that we're writing this cookbook.
But this is the fall on first Spanish language cookbook
published by a woman. Wow, what I love that UM
in the cookbook. She assumed the readers knew how to cook,
(07:16):
so a lot of the directions were like, and make
it in the usual manner. Do you imagine reading a
cookbook today, going and you know, salte those mushrooms in
the usual way. Yeah, the way that you do. Don't
go anywhere. Hungry for history will be right back. Welcome
(07:38):
back to the show. Here's more on the first Latina
to publish a Spanish language cookbook in the United States.
She leaves this heirloom to her nieces, and she says,
you should consider your needs because if a woman is rich,
she needs to manage, and if she is poor, she
(08:01):
needs to know how to work. So she's giving this,
but she cites these ancient Roman you know, cookbooks, and
she cites these ancient Persian parties and and I mean,
she was clearly an incredibly educated woman that decided to
do this, and this is you know, food as this
badge of identity, and she wanted her nieces to keep this.
(08:24):
And then when she died, the book fell into obscurity
like many things do that were at the time. You
know that we're published by women, by latinas it should
have fell into obscurity. I know in La there are
at least two copies of this book, the Huntington Library
and Pasadena has one in the LA Public Library Downtown
(08:44):
also has a copy. Wow, she was like the first
Martha Stewart also because she gave like, um, tips about
you know, outside of the cooking knowledge. She gave tips
like kitchen cleanliness the cardinal virtue of every cook or
select your ingredients carefully and know what your animals were fed. Um.
(09:08):
I mean she had a lot of like these amazing consejos,
what do you advices, a lot of different a lot
of advice. Yes, you know, even like you know, mushrooms,
like make sure that you if your mushrooms tripped yellow,
they're poisonous. If they're black, they're God. Yeah, so I
guess we could, Yeah, we could call her an early
and early Martha Stewart, early Martha Stewart. Do you have
(09:29):
this cookbook? Do you have it? I don't have the
actual cookbook, but I have this book. It's called In
Garnacion's Kitchen, and this was published in the early two thousands.
So's here she is. There's look at her, Oh my god,
look at her. I know she's beautiful, but this like
a very very fluffy dress. This is clearly that's a
(09:50):
very Spanish Spanish dress. That's a very Spanish attire. But
this is called in Garnessian's Kitchen Mexican Recipes from nineteenth
century California. So this is the book that I have.
And she was amazing. She also used to write for
newspaper columns. I mean, she was an incredible, incredible woman.
(10:15):
So what about Elena Zela Yetta. I told you about
her because somebody sent me a script about her life.
She was a celebrity chef before celebrity chefs existed. Her
life is fascinating, her life is amazing. When you told
me about her, I was like, how do I not
know about this woman? And I now I have like
all of her books. You know, she was up an
(10:39):
absolute force. And Lena was born in Mexico. Her parents
were Spanish from Barcelona and moved to Mexico and that
at the end of the nineteenth century, you know, to
make it in America, write for better opportunities. They were
not a well to do family at all. She was
(11:00):
born after her parents had been in Mexico for about
a year and a half at the beginning of the
Mexican Revolution, people were targeting Spaniards. They weren't wealthy Spaniards,
they just happened to be Spaniards. So they left Mexico
and moved to San Francisco. So she was she was
eleven years old when the family moved to San Francisco,
(11:21):
right before the revolution broke out. Well, what I love
about Elena, Like you know, she did speak English. She
was obsessed with cooking though and learning new dishes, and
she created a restaurant out of her home and it
was pretty successful. But she didn't have like the best
(11:41):
husband at the time, so she had kicked him out
and then she let him back in and she kind of,
you know, was this force of a woman in the household.
Like she was. She was a mom and she was
a wife, and she was also super entrepreneurial. She was
incredible at One thing that happened is that when she
(12:03):
was pregnant with her second child, with her second son,
she went blunt, like almost immediately went blunt and yeah.
And then she of course as she went into this deep,
deep depression and she left to cook. Like you said,
she had this very successful restaurant from her home and
she actually wrote her first cookbook. She was encouraged to
(12:23):
write her first cookbook. She didn't want to do it,
but she only agreed to do it so that she
could buy Seeing Eye Dog. So she wrote a cookbook
to get enough money to buy the dog. And then
what I find fascinating about Elena was her career took
off after losing her sight. Is czy, that's crazy, it's
(12:45):
mind blowing. Yes, after losing her sight is when she
agreed to write the first cookbook to buy Thing Eye Dog,
and she ended up selling ninety thousand copies. And then
she went on to you know, five different cookbooks. She
wrote an autobiography as well, and she was a teacher.
(13:06):
She had a pooking show, Yeah, she did. This is
what was fascinating to me was this story that I
told you about because she was the first woman, or
one of the first people to have a cooking show
on TV and she was blind and the audience didn't
believe it because she had strings attached to her ankles
(13:30):
to alert her to witch camera to look towards and
she would set out all the bowls in front of her.
And if you see a footage of this show, you
can see how she touches the brim of the bowl
and she kind of feels the ingredient in the bowl,
like and then you take your flower and she's kind
of double checking if she's touching the flower. But it's
(13:52):
really remarkable that she was a woman. She was a Latina,
she was blind, and she had a cooking show. It's crazy.
She had her son was in her show with her
as well, so he's sort of handing her things and
you can't tell because she looks at the camera based
like you said it based on web ankle what what?
What is stragas being pulled and she's really engaging with
(14:14):
the with the viewer. Yeah, she was, you know, a powerhouse.
She also had a frozen food business. Oh my god,
what I don't know that she had a frozen food
business and Lena's food specialty. She sold frozen thirtia said chiladas,
a mans and and she run this speciess with her
two sons. Her husband died tragically, um, even before all
(14:37):
of this started really happening. Yeah when also she had
she had a lot of hardship in her life. I
mean she was blind and then her husband was tragically killed,
um in a car accident. And despite all that, you see,
like the forward in her book by her friend, and
like newspaper articles that her life view or her outlook
(14:59):
in life was so awe inspiring. Like she she the
foreward in her book by Helen Brown was to know
z or to know easy is to have a favorite friend,
to know as a very special person. That she had
quick wit. She had thousands of friends. I wish I
could invite her to a dinner party. And they used
(15:19):
to say, she wrote this book in Nnaza Fiesta recipes,
the party recipes, this is the one that was The
foreward is by Helen Evans Brown, who was a powerhouse
in her own right. I mean she's known as the
sort of mother of California cooking. They were good friends,
and she said an e mail out and Lennaz is
a party. I love that. Every male is going to
(15:40):
be a party. She was not a fussy cook. She
was just fun. She was just nice. Um yeah, everybody,
everybody loved her. I love this, like you said, this,
this outlook on life, this view of life, it was
just so positive. I love. Also in her cookbooks, she
(16:03):
really made a point to differentiate Mexican cooking from Spanish
cooking and how it was very different, and so she
was like, well, you know, massa is not used in Spain.
Spain uses olive oil and saffron, and Mexican recipes can
be subtle, not everything is hot. But like she really
made clarifications between Spanish food and Mexican food. Absolutely, And
(16:27):
she does that in the first cookbook that she published,
which is the Swan that and in that's famous Mexican
and Spanish recipes. This is the one that she bought
for so that she could buy her Seeing Eye Dog.
And I love that. Different than the Spanish cook that
has Mexican recipes, this one she really breaks down what
is what, which was quite which was quite new, quite
(16:49):
groundbreaking at the time. How many cookbooks does she have?
I think she had five different cookbooks plus an auto
the biography. Yeah. So she died in nineteen seventy four. Wow,
oh year before I was born. What I found so
crazy was in the nineteen seventies her food line supplied
to weight Watchers. She was part of weight Watchers or
(17:10):
food at some point she was part of weight Watchers.
Isn't that crazy? And her granddaughter lives in the Bay
Area and still remembers her grandmother as being just do
this fireball. This is this amazing, amazing woman. And she
always had a lot of a lot of dichos in
her cookbooks. What do you call a lot of proverbs?
(17:32):
Proverbs all of that. Yes, And there's one actually, they
all of her cookbooks. I just opened it up to
this one and there's one proverb right here with a
little illustration. And she always had that. And she and
they said that she always spoke that way. She was
always saying that the chosen people were like, what are
you talking about? Because a lot of them don't really translate.
(17:53):
And it's one of the things that people find so
charming and funny about her. When we come back, award
winning Chef Claudet Sea, a San Diego, California based culinary entrepreneur,
sends us a message welcome back to Hungry for History.
(18:17):
On this very special episode celebrating Women's History Month. We
wanted to feature a female chef making waves in the
culinary world, and who better than Chef Claudet Sea, a
first generation daughter of immigrants who is known for her
fearlessness in the kitchen and beyond. Queenie must Tebela I
(18:40):
am a first generation Mexican American self proclaimed border kid.
I was born in San Diego and raised between Tijuana,
San Diego and Mara. At eighteen, I had my son, James,
and I realized when I looked at him that I
had to figure out what I was going to do
with the rest of my life to provide for him,
and also I follow my passions and my love so
(19:03):
I could tell him follow his And food was it
for me. Food. It brings me the most unadulterated joy
that I've ever had. It brings me a lot of pain,
it brings me a lot of growth, and you know,
twenty two years later, almost twenty three years later, I
can seriously say that there's really nothing else that I'd
rather be doing. Bringing my food, my Mexican food to
(19:29):
Australia was such a such a churning point, such a
point of pride, such an achievement not only for me,
but for the generations before me. And to bring this
a better name to Australia, you know, started off as
a joke and idea. Yeah, I went in. When we
got it off the ground in a month and a half,
(19:50):
and the reception that we received by the people in
Sydney was huge. I didn't know how many. I didn't
realize how many Mexicans were living in Sydne in Australia.
And we did a dinner in September where I went
and we had Mariazi, we had a solo Madriatzi outside.
It was just this really kind of coming of age
(20:11):
for myself in my career and you know, twenty plus
years in twenty two years in like this is something
that I in my wildest dream that my ancestors wildest dreams,
didn't think I'd ever was that it was possible. Didn't
think that I'd achieved, but not because it's not being
willing to take the chances. But I just didn't see
it in my people. You know, I didn't see it
(20:32):
in my surroundings. You know, having lost my father in
twenty twenty two and June, I wish he had been
present for that moment. He always as a child, he
always told me you were going to take a sea
name to the highest places and the highest mountains, and
he always wanted this for me as a child, and
(20:53):
to see it come to life was much more than
open at Ta Kadia in Sydney was really like it
was a transformational breaking of generational curses that I can't
even put into words what that meant to me and
little Claudet. I do think the culinary world is predominantly
(21:17):
male dominated across the world. I walk into kitchens to
this day it was no matter how much I've achieved
and how you know, TV articles, awards, and I'm still
regarded as the lady. Especially in European kitchens, you know
that chef is reserved for a male. So I think
it's definitely room for education in those moments where you can,
(21:40):
you know, tell this chef that maybe's working fifty years
in this industry, that you'd like to be addressed this
chef in a polite way, to draw those boundaries and
tell people how you want to be addressed. Thank you
so much for listening to our Women's History Month episode.
I love that we're celebrating these amazing women. Thank you
(22:02):
so much. Hungry for History is an unbelievable entertainment production
in partnership with Ihearts Michael Tura podcast Network. For more
of your favorite shows, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
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