Selling Fabiola Cabeza de Baca Books in Albuquerque: The Woman Who First Wrote Down New Mexican Cooking

By Josh Eldred · New Mexico Literacy Project · May 30, 2026 · ~1,750 words

Last verified May 2026 · Original research by Josh Eldred, who has bought and sorted northern New Mexico estate libraries for a decade.

The extension agent who became New Mexico’s first food writer

Cabeza de Baca was born in 1894 in Las Vegas, New Mexico, into one of the territory’s prominent Hispano families — descended, the family held, from the explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, with a great-grandfather granted the Las Vegas Grandes land grant in 1823 and an uncle, Ezequiel Cabeza de Baca, who became the second governor of the State of New Mexico. She grew up partly on the family ranch at La Liendre on the Llano, took a teaching certificate from New Mexico Normal College in 1912, and earned a second bachelor’s degree in home economics from New Mexico State University in 1929.

That degree launched a thirty-year career as an extension agent for the New Mexico Agricultural Extension Service, working the Hispano and Pueblo villages. She was the first Spanish-speaking agent in the service and the first sent out to the Pueblos, fluent in Spanish, English, Tewa, and Tiwa. She translated government bulletins into Spanish, ran a bilingual homemaking radio program on Santa Fe’s KVSF, and — crucially for collectors — gathered recipes, stories, and household lore in every kitchen she visited. In 1935 she co-founded La Sociedad Folklórica in Santa Fe with Cleofas Jaramillo and other women, dedicated to preserving the Spanish language and Hispanic traditions. She lost a leg in a 1932 train accident and kept working; she died in Albuquerque in 1991 and was buried on the family ranch near Newkirk.

The three books

Historic Cookery (first published 1931) collected the traditional recipes of the New Mexico villages and was, by most accounts, the first time nuevomexicano cooking was written down with exact measurements — chile sauce, masa, atole, panocha, menudo. It began life as a New Mexico Extension Service publication and went through many printings; it reportedly sold over 100,000 copies, and Governor Thomas Mabry famously mailed a copy, with a bag of New Mexico pinto beans, to the governor of every state. More than any other single book, it put New Mexico chile on the national table.

The Good Life: New Mexico Traditions and Foods (1949) went further, setting recipes inside the cultural calendar of a (fictional) village family, the Turrietas — one of the first cookbooks anywhere to root its recipes in the year’s feasts and seasons. It is also credited with the first published recipe for the hard-shell taco. Then came We Fed Them Cactus (University of New Mexico Press, 1954), her autobiographical narrative of four generations of Hispano ranching life on the Llano — the title taken from the drought years when families fed burned cactus to their starving cattle. Narrated through the voice of El Cuate, the camp cook, it is read today as a foundational New Mexico memoir and a precursor to Chicana literature, and it has never really gone out of print.

First-edition identification

Her books sit in two different worlds — ephemeral extension pamphlets and a university-press hardcover — so identification depends on which book you have:

• We Fed Them Cactus — look for the 1954 University of New Mexico Press first edition in dust jacket. UNM Press has kept the book in print with later editions and a well-known reissue, so the value separation is between a jacketed 1954 first and the many later printings. The jacket and the date are decisive.
• Historic Cookery is a printing-history puzzle. It exists in early New Mexico Extension Service editions, commercial reprints, and a widely circulated later edition; early printings and the original Extension issues are the collectible ones, but condition is rough because these were working kitchen books. Check the imprint and date carefully — an early or first Extension printing is a very different object from a 1970s souvenir reprint.
• The Good Life (1949) in its original printing is the scarce one; it has been reissued by the Museum of New Mexico Press, so again the date and imprint decide first-edition status.

Signed or inscribed copies of any of the three are uncommon and carry a real premium; given her stature in New Mexico cultural history, an association copy is a trophy.

The collector market — three tiers

Tier 1 — trophy: a jacketed 1954 University of New Mexico Press first of We Fed Them Cactus; a true first/early New Mexico Extension Service Historic Cookery; and any signed or inscribed copy.

Tier 2 — collector: the 1949 first of The Good Life; clean later hardcover printings of We Fed Them Cactus; and the better-preserved reprint editions of Historic Cookery.

Tier 3 — reading and kitchen copies: the souvenir and modern reprints of Historic Cookery, paperback editions, and well-used kitchen copies. These are the ones that do the most good donated and put back into New Mexico kitchens and classrooms.

Where she turns up — and how NMLP handles her

Cabeza de Baca’s books are everywhere New Mexico families have cooked: estate kitchens across the Albuquerque–Santa Fe–Las Vegas corridor, the libraries of teachers and extension families, and the shelves of anyone who has ever cared about real New Mexico food. Because Historic Cookery sold in the hundreds of thousands, the common reprints are easy to overlook — but the early Extension printings and a jacketed We Fed Them Cactus first hide in exactly the same boxes, and they are worth knowing on sight.

When her books come through a New Mexico Literacy Project pickup, the handling is the same as for any collectible New Mexico author: early printings, jacketed firsts, and signed copies are identified by hand and routed to specialist dealers or kept for the regional record rather than bulk-sorted; clean later editions go through careful resale; and the abundant reading copies go back to New Mexico kitchens, classrooms, and readers. Nothing readable is landfilled. If you are clearing a New Mexico home and the old cookbooks make you hesitate, that hesitation is worth a text.

External References

• Wikipedia: Fabiola Cabeza de Baca Gilbert — life, career, and bibliography.
• Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, NewMexicoHistory.org (New Mexico Office of the State Historian).
• Rudnick, Lois. “La Fabulosa Fabiola: First Lady of New Mexico Cuisine,” El Palacio (Museum of New Mexico), Winter 2012.
• Davis, Kate K. “Fabiola Cabeza de Baca Gilbert (1894–1991),” in American Women Writers, 1900–1945 (Greenwood Press, 2000).

Related on This Site

• Collecting New Mexico Cookbooks — the authority guide where Historic Cookery anchors the whole tradition.
• Cleofas Jaramillo — her co-founder in La Sociedad Folklórica and fellow keeper of nuevomexicano memory.
• Collecting New Mexico Ethnobotany — the sister tradition of writing down the plants and remedies of the villages.
• The New Mexico Literary Atlas — where Las Vegas and the Llano sit in the state’s literary geography.