Carmen Ramirez Degollado

Carmen Ramirez Degollado is a Mexican cook and restaurant owner who is known for her love of traditional ingredients and recipes. She was born in Xapala to a poor family in 1940. She learned how to cook from her family and nanny all sorts of family recipes. At 17 she was married to Raúl Ramírez Degollado and moved to Mexico. She took care of her family and in 1972 opened a restaurant with her husband called El Bajío. After a number of years her husband died, and she inherited the restaurant. From then she sold the traditional family recipes she was taught in her youth. she has never seen herself as a chef but rather a cook. In the years since then she has taken strides to preserve and spread those recipes to the world.

            Degollado is responsible for the spread of these recipes worldwide which means that people outside of Mexico are able to see and use them. Why this matters is that these traditional recipes leave us able to see how culture changes with interaction with foreign factors. We can see the regional differences from her cooking. As she comes from a small region, the culture would have been consumed by a larger one without such a public presentation. On top of this, Degollado managed and competed in the primarily male restraint business in Mexico City of the time, gaining international fame and outshining her male peers despite lacking formal management training.

            What Degollado’s story tells us is that recipes were recorded and passed down because they were worth saving, and the cultural tastes of a region are reflected in what gets saved. Looking at El Bajío we see an emphasis on high quality ingredients and a variety of vegetables. Ultimately the taste of tradition is preferred over new fads and temporary popularity.

Bittman, Mark, “The Matriarchs of Mexican Flavor,” The New York Times, May 2, 2007, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/02/dining/02chef.html

“’TITITA’. CARMEN RAMIREZ DEGOLLADO,” Lagastroneta April 1, 2021 http://lagastroneta.com/titita-carmen-ramirez-degollado/