Cocinas de New Mexico — PSC of NM cookbook collection (multi-printing) plus Bernalillo County Extension Service New Mexico Holiday Show

What this collection is

The Public Service Company of New Mexico — the regulated electric utility that today operates as PNM — ran a long, low-key promotional cookbook publishing program from at least the late 1960s through the 1980s. The principal title was Cocinas de New Mexico, a saddle-stitched soft-cover pamphlet collecting traditional New Mexican home recipes (red and green chile sauces, posole, sopaipillas, capirotada, chimichangas, sopa de albóndigas, biscochitos, calabacitas) drawn from contributing home cooks across the PSC service territory. The cookbook was distributed free or at low cost through PSC's bill-payment offices, customer-service events, and trade-show booths. Multiple printings exist with different cover treatments (tan with stylized agricultural illustration, orange with chile-ristra graphic, yellow with the PSC-of-NM "Reddy Kilowatt"-style sombrero-character logo, and others). Internal page counts and recipe selections vary slightly between printings.

The companion volume in this donation, New Mexico Holiday Show, was published by the Bernalillo County Extension Service from 620 Lomas NW, Albuquerque NM 87102 (the historical home of the County Extension office before its later relocations). The Cooperative Extension Service is the state-and-federal program (administered through NMSU's College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences) that sends agricultural and home-economics extension agents into New Mexico's counties to teach food preservation, family nutrition, 4-H youth development, and community resource management. The Holiday Show cookbook collected demonstration recipes from the Service's annual fall and winter cooking classes and was distributed at the demonstrations and through the Bernalillo office. Saddle-stitched, no ISBN, phone number 243-1386 printed on the cover — pure 1970s-1980s county-extension publishing infrastructure.

What makes these cookbooks scarce in the secondary market is what made them invisible to chain thrifts: they have no ISBN, no spine, no publisher barcode, no national distribution. They were given away, used in the kitchen, splashed on, dog-eared, and most copies eventually thrown out as the household moved or the cook stopped cooking. Surviving clean copies are increasingly hard to find, and demand from NM food historians, regional ephemera collectors, and Hispanic-cuisine researchers has been steady for decades. Recent eBay-sold-listing comparables (verified May 2026) range the mid-range collectible zone for clean individual copies; multi-book bundles like the three-book set documented here can clear respectable collectible value to the right buyer.

Why this collection matters

Three overlapping reasons:

• Food-history primary source. NM cuisine scholarship (Kelly Urig, Cheryl Alters Jamison, Carmella Padilla, Jane Butel) draws on this category of regional pamphlet cookbook for evidence of mid-century home-cooking practice across the state. The recipe selections, ingredient assumptions, measurement conventions, and substitution notes in PSC and Extension Service cookbooks are the kind of granular cultural data that doesn't survive in published trade cookbooks.
• Utility-history primary source. The PSC of NM (later PNM) cookbook series is also documentation of mid-century utility-customer-relations practice — the era when regulated utilities cultivated household-level relationships through promotional cookbooks, branded drinking glasses, and home-economics demonstrations. The cover art, the typography, the recipe-contributor attributions are all evidence of that period of utility-marketing history.
• Bernalillo County local history. The Extension Service Holiday Show cookbook documents the specific community-education programming the Albuquerque office ran in the 1970s-1980s, including which families contributed recipes, which traditional dishes were taught, and what canning/preservation techniques were emphasized.

For regional research libraries (Center for SW Research at UNM, Albuquerque Museum library, Museum of New Mexico Press archives, El Rancho de las Golondrinas reference collection) these cookbooks are exactly the kind of regional ephemera that's hard to acquire because clean copies don't appear in the trade. Most surviving copies are in private kitchens or estate collections.

Multi-part bibliographic record

How it came in

Donated in May 2026 through NMLP. Donor scenario anonymized per archive policy. The donor was about to recycle the stack as "old cookbooks" before bringing them in — one of the most common scenarios for this category of regional ephemera. Books in clean used condition with the typical kitchen handling characteristic of cookbooks that were actually used.

Where it's going

Most likely route: a regional NM food historian or cuisine scholar (the active secondary market is dominated by individual researchers and a small number of regional ephemera dealers who supply museum libraries). Secondary route: a NM-cuisine cookbook collector building a complete-printings shelf of Cocinas de New Mexico. Tertiary route: the Albuquerque Museum library or the Center for SW Research at UNM, both of which build regional ephemera reference collections and would benefit from clean copies of the multiple printings.