Biography
Elena Zelayeta was a Mexican American cookbook author and restaurateur. While running a restaurant in San Francisco in the 1930's with her husband, Elena lost her vision, but she relearned how to cook and went on to greater success.
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Elena Zelayeta was a Mexican American cookbook author and restaurateur. While running a restaurant in San Francisco in the 1930’s with her husband, Elena lost her vision, but she relearned how to cook and went on to greater success. She transformed the image of her native Mexican cuisine in the U.S. with a restaurant and popular cookbooks, all while overcoming a loss of sight.
Born and raised in Mexico City, Elena and her family moved to San Francisco when she was 12 after what was meant to be a vacation ended up being a permanent stay with the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910. Their family home destroyed, they took up residence near Union Square. It was a difficult time for Mexican immigrants, with white Americans accusing them of depriving them of jobs as laborers. From 1929 to 1936, the government carried out mass deportations of more than a million Mexicans and Mexican Americans. In the midst of the Depression, Elena, unable to find work, decided to realize her long-gestating dream of running a restaurant. She and her husband, Lorenzo Zelayeta, whose family also hailed from Mexico, began to serve chiles rellenos, or cheese-stuffed peppers, in their seven-room flat on Green Street, covering tables with pastel cloths.
In 1934, Elena began to lose her sight. She visited a doctor who told her there was no hope: a mature cataract and detached retina would ultimately leave her blind. Having fallen into a deep depression for years, cooking lifted Elena out of her misery. She relied upon her other senses, cracking eggs into her palms and separating them by letting the gooey insides slink through her fingers; smelling deep fat to assess its temperature; and poking at meat with her fingers to determine its doneness. She taught herself to caramelize sugar without scarring the bottom of the pan, to light a stove over and over until it became second nature to her, to deep-fry chiles rellenos without setting herself aflame. She would go on to write four cookbooks as well as a self-help book and a memoir, and star in a cooking program in the early 1950s.
Her success came at a time when many Americans regarded Mexican cuisine in belittling terms. “I think that Mexican food was thought of as kind of a low-level party food,” a granddaughter, also named Elena Zelayeta, after her grandmother, said in an interview. “I don’t think it was thought of as a cuisine.” Her repertoire of recipes became so robust that a group of home economists persuaded her to document her knowledge in a cookbook, her first: “Elena’s Famous Mexican and Spanish Recipes”. Her cookbook was an immediate success, selling over a half-million copies in her lifetime. As tragedies continued to befall her, Elena always used cooking as a buoy. After her husband died in a freak car accident, she recorded her resilience in a self-help book, complete with recipes, which made her into a local celebrity in the Bay Area. She began starring in a weekly 15-minute cooking show, “It’s Fun to Eat with Elena,” broadcast throughout California.
Reflecting on her career, she wrote in “Elena’s Lessons in Living”: “Of all the handicaps that afflict us, the greatest by far is fear. All of us have it. All must work to conquer it.” Elena’s resilience is an inspiring beacon for us all; sharing her warmth and heritage with so many people through her love of cooking.
- Lifespan
- 1898-1974
- Nationality
- Mexican-American
- Occupations
- Chef, Author
- Era
- 20th Century
- Born
- 1898 Reviewed
- Died
- 1974 Reviewed
- Tags
- Mexican-American, 20th Century, Chef, Author
- Themes
- Writing, Arts and Culture, Global History