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Remembering Francisco Solano López’s Foodways in Paraguay

By Bridget María Chesterton   

Map highlighting the territorial disputes of the War of the Triple Alliance
Map highlighting the territorial disputes of the War of the Triple Alliance. By Hoodinski, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The defeat of Paraguay by its powerful neighbors, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, during the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870) left the country in ruins. The complex causes of the war can be boiled down to the fact that Paraguayans sought to limit the growing power and influence of Brazil in Uruguay’s politics and economics. As Paraguayans held off their enemies over a number of years, the Paraguayan military and population was forced to feed itself on nothing more than oranges, manioca (yucca), and the occasional emaciated cow. It was a military and a country on a forced starvation diet.

The President and dictator of Paraguay, Francisco Solano López (popularly known by his military title “el Mariscal”), had led his country into this disastrous conflagration that left more than 90% of the male population dead from battlefield injuries and disease, but mostly from starvation. Struggling to understand Paraguay’s defeat in war, post-war intellectuals were quick to blame Solano López. However, by the 1930s, narratives about the war were changing. A new Liberal elite born after the war began to remember Solano López as a “hero” who saved the country from being totally dismembered by the allies. This stemmed from the logic that, while the country was certainly defeated in the war, it—and its people—remained.    

These new national narratives took many forms, including recipes. In 1931, Raquel Livieres de Artecona published the first Paraguayan cookbook. She stated in the introduction that it was written in the new “nationalist orientation [for] public education.” [i] For Livieres, the primary purpose of her book was to educate Paraguayan students about their glorious culinary past.

Newspaper article featuring picture of Raquel Liveres de Artecona.
Fig. 2. Image of Raquel Liveres de Artecona, in the public domain.

These recollections and recipes—based on the oral testimonies of women who remembered the war—proved to be powerful reminders of the importance of culinary survival after a devastating defeat.[ii] As an oral historian, Livieres recorded the memories of female survivors and their recipes. Not only did she collect the recipes, but she also named each individual woman who contributed to her collection. While it is impossible to tell where in Paraguay many of these women lived, it is most likely that the majority of the women lived in and around Asunción and were both white and elite, like Livieres. Even though not all Paraguayan women were included in this tome, some of the war’s survivors are remembered and also acknowledged and given a place in the broader history of Paraguay. By preserving these voices, not only had the country and its women survived the war, but its food traditions had also made survival possible. It was fundamental, then, to honor the past with foods that were beloved by the nation’s most important war hero, el Mariscal.

Livieres’ book, one of the few works written by a woman in the Liberal era (1904-1936), highlights the “heroic” food choices of el Mariscal.[iii] Written at the height of Liberal era politics in Paraguay and immediately following the broad educational reform in 1925 that refocused education in Paraguay along nationalistic lines, the text aligns with the new educational plan developed in the country.[iv] The cookbook was designed to be used in public schools in home economics courses throughout the nation and as a result found a wide audience among female Paraguayan students. As noted by the famed Paraguayan Liberal-era writer and intellectual Manuel Domínguez in the prologue of the cookbook, the book highlights “how our forefathers fed themselves” and thus “was one of the reasons, tested in war, behind their nutritive strength.”[v] During the Liberal era, Paraguayan food memory thus became a place where Paraguayans could take pride in their nation. 

Exploiting ideas of historical revisionism surrounding Solano Lopez, certain recipes in the cookbook were highlighted as “preferences” of the newly minted hero of the war and of Paraguay more generally. Writing that “a cream cake” and a “tomato jelly” were favorites of el Mariscal, Livieres taps into a clearly patriotic national narrative and a shared food recollection that honors the memory of Solano López.

A Spanish version of Livieres de Artecona's recipe for Tomato Jelly with Wedges
Fig. 3. Image used with permission of the owner, Carlos Vera Abed.

An English translation of Livieres de Artecona's recipe for Tomato Jelly with WedgesThrough this text, teaching women about the recipes from their nation’s history was a way to build the country’s heroic past for new generations born after the war. Thus, the text serves as a foundational intellectual work for the new Liberal era in Paraguay. Acknowledging Liveres as an intellectual in her own right gives women a place in the making of a new Paraguay.

 


 

[i] Raquel Livieres de Artecona, La Cocinera Paraguay (Asunción: La Colmena S.A. 1931), np.

[ii] Livieres de Artecona, La Cocinera Paraguay, 10.

[iii] For more on the remaking of Solano López as a national hero, see Bridget Maria Chesterton, The Grandchildren of Solano López: Frontier and Nation in Paraguay (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013).

[iv] David Velázquez Seiferheld, “’Desratizar la enseñanza es una tarea auténticamente nacionalista…’: La polémica sobre el nacionalismo y la Escuela Nueva. (1925-1941),” Historia de la educación – anuario 16 no. 2 (December 2015).

[v] Manuel Domínguez, “Prolog,” in Raquel Livieres de Artecona, La Cocinera Paraguay (Asunción: La Colmena S.A., 1931), np.

 


Bridget María Chesterton is Professor of History at Buffalo State University where she teaches Latin American History and Commodities Histories. Her current book project is entitled Hotel Guaraní: The Brazilianization of the Paraguayan Middle Class during the Stroessner Era and is currently under contract with the University of Pittsburgh Press. She has also published in Food and Global History, Journal of Women’s History, Hispanic American Historical Review, and Journal of Social History among others. Her email is chestebm@buffalostate.edu.

Of Rodents, Stockfish, and Win-the-War Soup: Surviving Starvation in Biafra

By Enemchukwu Nnaemeka

Wars in post-colonial Africa, like in other places across the world, were not only fought with guns, ammunitions, and bombardments but also with strategies of starvation. Starvation as a military strategy has been employed by various groups throughout history, with the primary intent of forcing an enemy to surrender or retreat. These strategies take diverse forms, especially through scorched-earth methods such as the burning of farmlands, the poisoning or contamination of food storage or drinking water, or the outright blockade or bombardment of markets, food networks, foodways, and systems, including airways, waterways, roadways, ports, and airports. While various studies have addressed starvation as a strategy of war, especially as implemented by victors,[i] the question remains:  how have victims of war, especially civilians, survived in the face of deliberate starvation? In many instances, civilians voluntarily or forcefully give up their food to soldiers as their contribution to war efforts, making them the chief casualties of war starvation.

A group of children attempt to receive food from an aid worker.
Fig. 1. Food distribution at the Swedish Red Cross Centre in Udo during the Biafran War. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

In the case of the Biafran War, civilians readily reinvented their nutrition in the face of scarcity. Between 1967 and 1970, the Biafra Republic defended itself from the onslaught of the British-Soviet-US backed Nigerian Army. Historian Egodi Uchendu found that children between10 and 18 hunted lizards and rats as a source of food,[ii] while various Christian and humanitarian organizations smuggled stock-fish—otherwise known as dried codfish, which is today consumed by Igbo people of Eastern Nigeria, former citizens of Biafra—to make up for their deficiency in protein.[iii] Before this, neither lizards nor codfish were commonly featured on Igbo menus. While lizards as a source of protein have largely fallen out of use, codfish has remained a national food source among the Igbo, serving as a reminder of how they survived the war.

Six workers unload wooden crates of codfish from a helicopter.
Fig. 2. A relief team unloads crates of codfish that were airlifted from the Nigerian cities of Calabar or Port Harcourt. Image courtesy of the CDC Public Health Image Library, #7162.

As the Biafran population faced blockades that restricted access to crude oil depots in Port Harcourt—essential for powering their war machines—they turned to processing oil palm as an alternative fuel source for warplanes and armored tanks. This shift, however, further depleted the region’s food reserves, as oil palm was also a dietary staple. Consequently, survivors who depended on oil palm for preparing soups had to carefully ration its use, giving rise to what became known as “Win-the-War” soups. These soups were characteristically thin and watery, having little protein, with salt often extracted by boiling already-salted codfish, commonly referred to as stockfish. Remarkably, the legacy of “Win-the-War” soup endured among Igbo families long after the conflict’s end. Whenever a younger generation prepares a poorly made, watery soup, older family members—who lived through the war—often tease them, jokingly calling it “Win-the-War” soup. Thus, food provides a lens through which older Igbo generations recount tales of the war, weaving personal and collective memory into everyday life.

A pan of corn soya milk sits over a fire, while a hand stirs the contents.
Fig. 3. Corn soya milk (CSM) being cooked into a bread-like food during the Nigerian-Biafran war. Image courtesy of

The stories point to the fact that an exploration of how civilian populations sourced and invented new foods and reinvented the old during starvation-ravaged conflicts is long overdue. While studies on humanitarianism in war are abundant, the ingenuity of those facing systematic starvation—how they changed their diets and adapted to scarcity—remains underexplored. Indeed, the history of Biafra is not solely a narrative of bombardment and famine. It is also a story of widespread stockfish consumption, shifting gender roles in trade and breadwinning, childhood experiences tied to rodent hunting, and the broader intersections of food sourcing and culinary innovation. These elements reveal a resilient population adapting to extraordinary circumstances, crafting new recipes and survival strategies amid adversity.

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[i] George Alfred Mudge, “Starvation as a Means of Warfare,” International Lawyer 4, no. 2 (1970): 228, https://scholar.smu.edu/til/vol4/iss2/3; Bridget Conley and Alex de Waal, “The Purposes of Starvation: Historical and Contemporary Uses,” Journal of International Criminal Justice 17, no. 4 (2019): 699-722.

[ii] Egodi Uchendu, “Recollections of Childhood Experiences during the Nigerian Civil War,” Africa 77, no. 3 (2007): 408. Uchendu’s is one of few studies that capture some strategies adopted by the civilian population, especially women and children, to survive economic blockades and the subsequent food shortages they create.

[iii] Robert E. Gribbin, “Two Relief Crises: Biafra and Sudan,” Africa Today 20, no. 3 (1973): 49; Fiona Bateman, “Ireland and the Nigeria-Biafra War: Local Connections to a Distant Conflict,” New Hibernia Review 16, no. 1 (2012): 48.

 


Nnaemeka Enemchukwu earned his bachelor’s degree in History and International Studies from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He went on to complete a master’s degree in History and Strategic Studies at the University of Lagos and is currently pursuing a second master’s in History at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. His research interests span the economic, migration, labor, and social histories of West Africa in the 20th and 21st centuries. His scholarship has been published in notable outlets, including the Journal of Military History (Nigeria Defence Academy), the Nigerian Forum (Nigerian Institute of International Affairs), and the African Studies Review (Cambridge University Press).

Stretching the Boundaries

By Lino Mioni

Roselli, G. d. Epulario quale tratta del modo de cucinare ogni carne, ucelli, pesci de ogni sorte, et fare sapori, torte, et pastelli al modo de tutte le provincie / [giovanni de roselli]. Venice: 1538. Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.
Roselli, G. d. Epulario quale tratta del modo de cucinare ogni carne, ucelli, pesci de ogni sorte, et fare sapori, torte, et pastelli al modo de tutte le provincie / [giovanni de roselli]. Venice: 1538. Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.

Collating together in one single volume the medical and culinary knowledge and recipes, or any other form of instructions, of food preservation and fermentation, is an activity that has been performed by many social groups, regardless of size (be it family, estate, professional association, church, congregation). Usually in manuscript form, these recipe collections are the essence of shared culinary traditions and common knowledge and, ultimately, they are brought into existence by a desire to protect and preserve that knowledge and traditions for future generations. 

Not having the tangible economic value and purpose of their printed counterparts, manuscript culinary recipe collections represent a type of text that can offer a wide range of analysis exactly because of their more intrinsically personal and variable nature. Due to their different origins, scope, and purpose, these manuscript recipe collections can assume varied forms; they can be prepared exclusively for personal use or for collective fruition; they can be prepared to be shared with individuals outside of the social group or not; they can be created for simply preserving the common shared knowledge of a specific social group or to praise and extol the social group that produced them; and they can also be considered as cultural objects. These different types of culinary recipe collections are the focus of Kernan’s and Müllneritsch’s edited volume Culinary Texts in Context, 1500-1800. The nine contributions to the edited volume focus on culinary texts: the way these nine contributions are organized within the edited volume richly illustrates the wide scope of the research being done on manuscript culinary texts while, and at the same time, it stretches the boundaries of the research field itself. 

Ultimately, culinary texts are fascinating due to the low degree of authorship they display. One can claim authorship of a story, of a poem, of a play, or an idea, but is it even conceivable claiming authorship of the set of instructions for a culinary preparation, which is, by definition, shared and common knowledge? Although a person might inscribe herself/himself as the initial compiler of a manuscript recipe collection, this person is just the organizer and editor of the chosen contents. Moreover, in case of family recipe collections more than one initial individual might collaborate by commenting on, adding to, and expanding the recipes of the original collection.

Two concepts that stand out throughout the volume are recipe collection and dissemination. Collecting recipes, when it comes to manuscripts culinary recipe compendia, at least in early modern and modern times, implies combining personal or household traditions with knowledge from attestors(such as geographical region or personal connection via recipes offered by friends, a person from another family, etc.), along with other information collated and collected from a variety of other sources: printed books, other publications, etc. In this latter case, although not impossible, the source of that recipe is not always easy to trace. Culinary recipe collections dissemination, although much easily detectable when it comes to printed cookbooks, is also present in the manuscript tradition. Recipes can be translated and transcribed in another language, giving access to culinary traditions of foreign countries. In this respect the chapters on Sir Martin’s Westcombe’s Iberian Recipes by Annamaria Valent and on Finnish manuscript recipe books by Maren Jonasson and Märtha Norrback are particularly interesting since, although in different social and historical contexts, they reveal how not only culinary recipes and food preparations but ingredients can be disseminated beyond geographical and regional boundaries.

I mentioned before that Culinary Texts in Context, 1500-1800 by Sarah Peters Kernan and Helga Müllneritsch stretches the boundaries of the research field that focuses on manuscript recipe books. By giving a wider geographical scope to the research being done, this volume will not only entice further research and investigation, but also, and hopefully, expand the representation of other culinary traditions within the European continent within the research community.

Lino Mioni is Subject Librarian for Romance Languages and Literatures, Latin American Studies, and Linguistics at Washington University in St Louis Libraries. In his PhD dissertation (Indiana University 2020), he analyzes the 14th and 15th century traditions of culinary recipe collections of the Italian peninsula and investigates how these recipe collections are reappropriated and disseminated in printed editions. The introduction of print changed, among many other things, how culinary knowledge was produced, shared, and, consequently, used. Maestro Martino, and the manuscripts attributed to him, are a paradigmatic example of how a culinary recipe collection in manuscript form were used and circulated through print and by print. The many printed editions of the Epulario, which take the text from the Maestro Martino’s tradition, shed light on the editorial success a culinary recipe collection can have once it is transposed from manuscript to printed form, as well as on the characteristics of 16th and 17th century popular print culture.

Recipes in Cultural Flow

By Anil Paralkar

Attr. Rin Shihei, "Dutch people at the meal," Japan, ca. 1790-1810, color woodcut on paper, NG-1978-110, Rijksmuseum.
Attr. Rin Shihei, “Nederlanders aan de maaltijd,” Japan, ca. 1790-1810, color woodcut on paper, NG-1978-110, Rijksmuseum. In the image, two enslaved people from the Indonesian archipelago serve food and drink to five white Dutch men; they are probably intended to symbolise VOC personnel on Deshima/Dejima.

Understanding global exchanges has played a central role in food history research in recent decades. Recipes, as a type of source, present both challenges and opportunities when it comes to investigating cultural flows. Culinary Texts in Context, 1500-1800 offers a series of case studies on topics such as English-Iberian and Finnish-Swedish culinary interactions, as well as the introduction of ingredients from the Americas to the Iberian Peninsula. Beyond offering a number of case studies, the volume reminds us that recipe collections are “material and textual manifestations of familial, friendship, and professional networks” and that they “contain traces of the places that people, ingredients, and recipes travel.” (Kernan, Müllneritsch, 25) The various contributions to the volume follow such traces and highlight how recipes showcase regional and global cultural flows.

As expected for the early modern period, many of the recipe collections under discussion show the influx of non-European ingredients. These ingredients serve not only as expressions of a new economic globalization, but also as evidence of how ingredients were adapted and adopted in new foodscapes. Yet Culinary Texts in Context provides its most valuable insights into cultural interaction not merely through analyses of ingredients, but by exploring how the transmission of recipes contributed to the creation of particular culinary texts. We learn how Philipp Hainhofer, agent to August of Saxony, assembled the ducal book collection with its culinary texts in Germany, Austria, and Italy (Denicolò, 71-74); which donors informed Sir Martin Westcombe’s Iberian recipes (Valent, 103-108); how familial connections between Swedish and Finnish upper social strata facilitated recipe exchanges in the 18th and 19th centuries (Jonasson, Norrback, 125-130, 150-151); how Maria Clara Dückher assembled her recipe collection with the help of family networks; or how Mary Leadbeater’s culinary collecting in 18th/19th century Ireland was nurtured through correspondences (Ridolfo, 265-270).

Tracing these paths of transmission offers a deeper understanding of the processes of inclusion and hybridization of foods and dishes. It tells the story of why certain collectors included unfamiliar recipes in their culinary texts, or how they even acquired such recipes in the first place. Analyzing signs of use—such as stains or marginalia—can also provide insight into whether such transmissions concerned mere textual knowledge or were part of culinary practices. By combining sources on the genesis of culinary texts, such as correspondence and diaries, with internal evidence from the culinary texts themselves, we gain an understanding of the “microhistories” (Valent, 101) of culinary cultural flows. At this intersection, we can begin to determine whether a recipe in a collection was the result of culinary transculturation—shaped by influences from all involved spheres of culinary culture—or whether it was an outcome of a superficial cross-cultural impetus that unleashed little cultural transformation. As Isabel Braga notes, there is an important distinction between “a recipe from a certain place” and one “in the style of.” (Braga, 197) Recipes “in the style of” are often found in early modern culinary texts, indicating a region of origin, such as Indian pickles. These recipes typically draw on ingredients or preparation methods characteristic of a specific region but were not collected in that region. Instead, they were recorded in the recipe author’s home region, often with modifications that reflect the culinary culture of the author or projected ideas of culinary otherness onto an imagined region of origin. In contrast, recipes like those of Francisco Broges Henrique from Brazil (Braga, 196-198), Martin Westcombe’s from Spain (Valent, 101-108), or, on a local scale, the recipes transferred by traveling confectioners between Barcelona and Northeastern Catalonia (Manzanares Mileo, 173-177), speak of an actual engagement with ingredients and methods from one region and how they were adapted and integrated into new foodscapes. The distinction made by Braga, is key to understanding how the cross- and transculturation of recipes operated within systems of global communicative and power imbalances.

As Marlene Ernst observes, while it may be possible to trace the transfer of specific recipes, these were often “adapted to local languages and dialects.” (Ernst, 230) In many cases, it may not be possible to locate additional sources, such as correspondence or diaries, that detail the transfer of culinary texts. However, by tracing similar recipes across different collections, we can examine the changes between them and investigate the linguistic shifts Ernst mentions. Culinary Texts in Context demonstrates how the history of culinary text transmission through individual actors and their networks, the use of ingredients, and forms of describing a ‘culinary other’ in recipes offer rich opportunities for understanding how culinary cultural flows operated in the early modern period.

Anil Paralkar currently writes his PhD on early modern European ideas about Indian food and foodways at Heidelberg University. He is also a lecturer at Witten/Herdecke University, where he explores the history of Renaissance and early modern knowledge with his students. In his research, he investigates how Renaissance and early modern European writers projected a culinary ‘other’ onto India and how the European presence on the subcontinent altered these projections. In this endeavor, he also published on the earliest English recipes for South Asian food. His interests include postcolonial and transcultural theory, global food history, and a good meal.

Food, Magic, Art, Science, and Medicine