Su Libro
out of the heat, into the kitchen
Kitchens from the pueblo, the hacienda, and the suburbs inspire two useful new books. We also savor a memoir of growing up in ’50s and ’60s Mora and Corrales and revisit a classic book on the deepest roots of New Mexico style—Santa Fe and otherwise.
All New Kitchen Idea Book, by Joanne Kellar Bouknight, Taunton Press, paperback, $19.95.
America’s Kitchens, by Nancy Carlisle and Melinda Talbot Nasardinov, Tilbury House, Publishers (published with Historic New England), paperback, $34.95.
Sweet Nata: Growing Up in Rural New Mexico, by Gloria Zamora, University of New Mexico Press, hardcover, $24.95.
This article first appeared in Summer 2009 Su Casa
All New Kitchen Idea Book, by Joanne Kellar Bouknight, Taunton Press, paperback, $19.95.
Often the best way to set about redesigning the kitchen is to see an example that you just love. Suddenly you can picture exactly how yours will look, done that way. Or maybe you see parts from various kitchens that will unite in a harmonious whole only at your house: those cabinets, this island, that countertop.
With more than 350 photos, design tips from kitchen professionals, expert information on lighting, cabinetry, and countertops, and even suggestions on saving money and going green, this fine volume by Joanne Kellar Bouknight covers kitchens from head to toe. The well-chosen, consistently good photos illustrate a wide range of architectural styles under the loose categories of traditional, modern, and eclectic. Although Kellar Bouknight doesn’t touch Southwestern style or Santa Fe style, or Old World or Tuscan, or any of the classic or emerging genres we see in New Mexico, you can adapt most of her advice and examples directly to home building or remodeling here, regardless.
Sometimes books like this seem to be reverse engineered from their photos; that is, authors think of things to say about the pictures. Not so in Kitchen Idea Book. Kellar Bouknight starts with crisp advice on kitchen layout, then moves through all the specific details people consider when designing a new kitchen or redoing an existing one. Countertops, surfaces, and backsplashes; sinks and faucets; islands and furniture; the varieties of cabinet construction and style; appliances; and all kinds of hardware—Kellar Bouknight missing nothing. She drills down into the smallest details, like hinges, pulls, and other hardware; spice racks; a wide assortment of shelves and pullouts; and so on. She even devotes a chapter to floors, walls, and ceilings; here in the Southwest, often these structural elements infuse the space with the local flair that characterizes the rest of the house. These could be vigas at the ceiling, bricks on the floor, a deep-set window in a thick adobe wall, or all three.
The book goes light on green, and the resources are sketchy in the back, mostly a listing of fairly obvious websites. As Kellar Bouknight herself points out, though, you can research the topic to your heart’s content on the Internet. As for sustainability, if you want more than the occasional tips in the Kitchen Idea Book, take it to a Build Green New Mexico builder, for instance, show him or her what you like, and ask the builder to make it like that, only green.
The strength of this book lies in its inspirational value. Rather than first browsing through the local cabinetmaker shop, kitchens store, or big box warehouse to begin dreaming up your new “heart of the home,” you might read the Kitchen Idea Book first, then shop those places with intent, a list of questions, and a clearer idea of what you want. Knowing what’s possible helps you envision your project and track down the components that make it real.
America’s Kitchens, by Nancy Carlisle and Melinda Talbot Nasardinov, Tilbury House, Publishers (published with Historic New England), paperback, $34.95.
America’s Kitchens by Nancy Carlisle and Melinda Talbot Nasardinov approaches the kitchen not as a home equity loan project but as an expression of culture, of gender roles, of who we are as people and as a people. The authors assert that “the history of the kitchen is also the history of women” in America. From colonial times—that is, the colonies of the eastern seaboard and the Spanish colony in New Mexico—to the present, the evolution of the kitchen reads as a metaphor or, better, a monument to the prevailing status quo of the American family. “As the symbolic center,” they write, “the kitchen gives meaning to family life.” (Nowadays family has itself become a loaded, disputed, ambiguous term as much defined by politics and custody decrees as by genetics.)
So what do we see when we look into the kitchen? Once it was an open hearth big enough to roast a stag over open flames. Enlivened by paintings, drawings, and sketches, recipes and quotations and clips of advertisements in more recent years, historical cookbooks, propaganda posters, postcards, and other ephemera, America’s Kitchens exhaustively covers its topic. Here are the colonial New England hearth, plantation freestanding kitchen cabins, pueblo Indian food preparation sites, and the cocinas of Spanish New Mexico. They move on through the postwar kitchen and the golden age of suburbia to just barely touch on the contemporary kitchen.
It’s all fascinating. Heart of the home? Maybe. But whether it’s on the pueblo, in the hacienda, or in a clapboard New England house where women employed the latest 19th-century gadgets, the kitchen for most of its history has been a place of hard work. Harriet Beecher Stowe, of Uncle Tom’s Cabin fame, coauthored with her sister a domestic advice book called The American Woman’s Home. Yet she wrote to her absent husband about the drudgery of endless tasks—she couldn’t wait to get out of the kitchen at day’s end. “In fact,” Carlisle and Talbot Nasardinov write, “women complained that the work was relentless, time-consuming, occasionally backbreaking, and even soul-destroying.”
Geez, take a look out West, where at the New Mexico pueblos women were still hand-grinding corn beneath flat stones. Well into the 1950s, traditional practices continued in the more remote communities. The chapter “Kitchens Along the Rio Grande, 1821–1912” (essentially the Mexican period through territorial to statehood) devotes a surprising degree of attention to the development of cooking spaces in New Mexico.
Carlisle and Talbot Nasardinov trace Native American practices—a great photo sequence illustrates baking bread in an horno (the beehive oven introduced by the Spanish). The authors examine kitchen layouts in haciendas like El Rancho de las Golondrinas outside Santa Fe and look at the interplay among Native American, Spanish, and Anglo American cultures, with an appropriate homage to the role of chile. They see the most lasting influence coming from the pre-American-era cultures: “In New Mexico the kitchen was not only the place where the blending of Mexican, Spanish, and Native cultures was apparent in the people, equipment, and food, but the place where these converged to create a unique heritage.”
Maybe that’s most true from a culinary perspective; we see little of this cultural heritage expressed in kitchen design. In fact, when Su Casa contacts kitchen designers in our search for a traditional New Mexico kitchen, we’re often met with silence. You don’t see a new fogon de campana—the elevated kitchen fireplace—a shepherd’s bed fireplace, or a functional horno anymore. American technology—wood-burning cookstoves, then ranges, microwaves, and the whole arsenal of kitchen technology, cabinetry, and modern space planning—rendered these things obsolete. Architecturally, folks today are willing to revisit design elements like the zaguan (the protected passage to an inner courtyard), portal, vigas, and latillas. But nobody wants to re-create the preindustrial kitchen.
As young adults continue to find charm and reservoirs of (kitschy?) style in 1950s and 1960s design, the relevance of postwar kitchens seems to far outstrip that of adobe cocinas. The sprawling new ’burbs, represented by the master-planned and prototypical Levittown, New York, generated the open-plan kitchen that flowed into the adjacent living spaces, which Carlisle and Talbot Nasardinov consider to be the “most iconic” of American kitchens: efficient, attractive, even fashionable. Here the book tiptoes the line of camp in its illustrations of mid-century American culture, with gleaming appliances, bold primary colors, short-skirted women serving meals to plucky kids at Formica tables. “Hey, Wally, pass the peanut butter!” Forget that, I want a Swanson TV Dinner. Gadgets, labor-saving appliances, increasingly expensive surfaces—and Tupperware! and Tupperware parties!—come to define the “it” kitchen.
Compare the ads from the 1950s with those of today and you’ll see many of the same themes at play: the work is fun, the women fashionable, the men (usually) either absent or uninvolved in the actual tasks of cooking. Sometimes you’ll see a group of friends—both sexes—preparing a meal, or the whole family. And for sure all that equipment means far, far less work.
With a laptop on the counter, a flat-screen TV in the cabinetry, and a furniture-grade, marble-topped island holding up that glass of pinot noir, who would want to leave the kitchen anyhow?
From Hacienda to Bungalow: Northern New Mexico Houses, 1850–1912, by Agnesa Lufkin Reeve, University of New Mexico Press, paperback (print-on-demand edition), $30.
If we remember that a few influential outsiders with marketing intent essentially named and codified Santa Fe style in the 1910s and 1920s, then it’s worth wondering what came before it. We New Mexicans just had houses, right? Architects and others like Sylvanus Morley, Rapp and Rapp, Carlos Vierra, and John Gaw Meem didn’t invent Santa Fe style out of whole cloth. They pieced it together from the designs of earlier Pueblo and Spanish structures of the region—hence the parallel term, Spanish Pueblo Revival. In fact, these dons were not only reviving what they considered to be the region’s authentic architecture. They also were reacting against a half-century’s worth of imported trends brought from Anglo America—from the East Coast, the Midwest, and the U.S. Army. Later, as in the case of Territorial style, they even unironically incorporated elements from these interlopers into the ever-hybridizing Santa Fe look (which now smilingly applies “eclecticism” to everything from Japanese style carpentry to African art and French Country furnishings).
In From Hacienda to Bungalow: Northern New Mexico Houses, 1850–1912, author Agnesa Lufkin Reeve takes a look at the evolution of home building during the early United States period, essentially from the acquisition of New Mexico as a U.S. territory till statehood. Probably every aspect of life in New Mexico during this period expressed a dramatic tension resulting from the new clash of cultures and the accelerating rate of change. One could argue this tension continues to shape New Mexico culture today. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the power struggles among Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo cultures manifested in outright war, in struggles over land ownership and water rights, in social interactions, in commerce and trade, and in home building.
The latter creates Lufkin Reeve’s opportunity: “In the structures of no other time or place,” she writes, “is the history of a society in transition more subtly but clearly written, than in the houses of the Territory of New Mexico.” She starts with the early haciendas from the 1820s, like the Severino Martinez hacienda in Taos, which has been restored and re-created, giving a strong sense of the pre-American-era residences of the wealthy. And it’s interesting to note that the wealthy distinguished themselves not by upscale materials—the remote location limited the palette to adobe, vigas, stone foundations, dirt floors, and so on—but by sheer size. When the Americans arrived, they came as soldiers and traders. They built with adobe but introduced new floor plans, new rooflines, and new materials hauled first by wagon and later by railroad from the Midwest and East.
When the Army built Fort Union northeast of Las Vegas to protect trade and travelers on the Santa Fe Trail, it brought Greek Revival architecture, new technology (manufactured nails and glass windows, for instance), precise carpentry (from manufactured tools), and a new “sense of the possible,” Lufkin Reeve writes. But the Army still built with adobe, using local methods. When Greek Revival melded with Pueblo, Lufkin Reeve says, the new hybrid Territorial style emerged, with its fired-brick coping atop adobe walls, elaborate wooden trim, and a central hall flanked on either side by rooms instead of the old linear adobe arrangement where most of the rooms lacked internal connections to one another.
Various other fusions and hybrids infiltrated New Mexico home building as the 19th century wore on. In the railroad era (post 1879), the Mills House in Springer, for instance, incorporated Territorial style with a Mansard roof, Queen Anne detailing, a two-story portal, and adobe walls. The Chase Ranch near Cimarron—covered many years ago in Su Casa—had adobe walls but no other evidence of New Mexican influence. Soon builders were putting up wood homes—Queen Anne and Georgian—and eventually Arts and Crafts bungalows and California mission houses all in a desire to modernize and in implicit protest of the region’s “shapeless adobes.”
By 1900, the homes exhibited a “bland” conformity to generic national tastes, Lufkin Reeve writes, and bore “little cultural relationship” to New Mexico.
Then artists and writers discovered the area. Drawn by the perceived “mystique” of the place, they moved in and often devoted themselves to preserving the cultural heritage, including adobe homes. People like Meem studied churches and other vernacular architecture in great detail and found ways to incorporate it into homes that met the “modern” needs of 20th-century New Mexicans. And ever since, a strong vein of preservationist thinking has informed New Mexico home building, as one can still find a newly built Pueblo style home with adobe walls, protruding vigas, and heavy wooden lintels under a shady portal.
Lufkin Reeve’s book offers a readable summary of New Mexico design history through this prestatehood era, and as such it deserves to be brought back into print. It should be noted that this edition of the book is a print-on-demand reprint of the 1988 first edition. Brace yourself for very murky black-and-white photos in an otherwise first-class book. Still it’s a great read and reminds us that architecture and design continually evolve, borrow from other traditions, and adapt to the needs and resources of home builders.
Sweet Nata: Growing Up in Rural New Mexico, by Gloria Zamora, University of New Mexico Press, hardcover, $24.95.
Spanning the years between 1951 and 1967, Gloria Zamora’s elegantly understated memoir Sweet Nata captures the essence of a way of life gone by. It’s a detailed, impressionistic portrait from a child’s perspective of life in the quiet New Mexican villages of Mora, then Corrales during the postwar boom years. In that time, the rhythms and lifeways of suburbia and pop culture would come to dominate the mainstream American cultural landscape but hadn’t quite reached the small, isolated villages of New Mexico—particularly a remote place like Mora. Here they carried on a traditional way of life defined by the rhythms of farming and ranching, the cycle of seasons, the schedule of church holidays, and the highlights of family celebrations. Even Corrales, where Gloria moved to live with her parents and begin elementary school, seemed so much farther from Albuquerque 30, 40, 50 years ago—and remained steeped in an agrarian culture with deep roots to land and church as outsiders arrived in ever-increasing numbers.
In the early chapters about Mora, Zamora inhabits a toddler’s point of view, a preschool child living each day as a loose set of unfiltered experiences, a kaleidoscope of vivid, often sensory memories. She doesn’t interpret, editorialize, or judge. The heavy events pass by in the same unadorned tone as do the light. We don’t know why she’s living with her grandparents because she doesn’t know why. Sometimes Hemingway’s rule about fiction seems to shape Zamora’s chapters: the unsaid thing propels the story. A plainly told chapter about a childhood molestation and Grampa’s protective response and sublimated anger brims with unsurfaced emotion. But the love and devotion she shares with Grama and Grampa nearly levitates the ink off the book’s pages.
The book opens with the kind of gauzy atmosphere that swaths our earliest memories: “I awake to find myself alone in this room with a bed in every corner.” A world of light and sound and smells greets her, “the soft light coming from the south window through lace curtains and the smell of coffee and oatmeal and the sound of a crackling fire and the ranchera music coming from the large shortwave radio on top of the refrigerator.” We don’t quite know where we are yet, on a farm or a ranch, but we’re with Grama and Grampa, and Grama sits in a rocker reading stories to Gloria or crocheting a doily, sometimes humming a hymn.
A large extended family of cousins, aunts, uncles, and others surround the young girl. The house has no electricity or running water. The outhouse is too scary to contemplate at night. As Gloria gets older, she explores more of her world: the attic, the fields, trips to Mora and to church. It seems an idyllic existence, though not without its sickness and sorrow and pains both emotional and physical. Zamora never glosses the negative; she just doesn’t dwell on it.
She also doesn’t dwell on herself. Zamora doesn’t write to settle old scores or to pad her self-importance. In a sense, she’s one character among many. Her grandparents often take center stage. Her parents, brothers and sisters, and various extended family members, the tíos and abuelos and primos, the vecinos and school mates and padres and nuns swell into a cast as big as that in a Cecil B. DeMille feature film. Together they move through quick scene after quick scene: a funeral, going visiting on Sundays in Mora, picking piñon nuts in the Sandia Mountains, visiting the old paternal homestead at Abo, weeding her father’s chile field in Corrales, attending a dance at nearby Perea Hall, rounding up cattle in the bosque, driving through Albuquerque’s North Valley on Christmas Eve to look at the lights, making butter from sweet nata (cream). Each time, Zamora emphasizes the telling detail over the dramatic crux.
Years after reuniting with her parents and siblings in Corrales, Zamora learns why she went to live with her mother’s parents in Mora: times were hard, money was tight, it seemed the best thing to do at the time. Her mother, Irene, tells her she cried and cried when Gloria went away. That’s all.
It’s fitting, in some emotional symmetry, that the memoir is shaped by Grama and Grampa: the years with them, then the years in Corrales when Gloria seemed to count the days till she’d return to Mora for summer vacation, then the passing of Grama and very shortly thereafter of Grampa, where the book ends. A scant couple months after his wife had died, Grampa passes away on Christmas Eve after telling Gloria where he wanted to be, and with whom, para la navidad. She has lost her best friend, a loss we readers feel poignantly in this vivid book.