Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was a Hieronymite nun in Mexico City, a poet, and the most formidable self-taught scholar of seventeenth-century New Spain. When the Bishop of Puebla, writing as “Sor Filotea”, urged her to leave secular learning alone, she answered with the Respuesta (1691), a defence of a woman’s right to study. In one passage she lists what the kitchen teaches: an egg holds together in hot fat and falls apart in syrup; sugar stays liquid with a drop of water that once held quince. Then the joke with a blade in it: had Aristotle cooked, he would have written much more. Knowledge is not only in books, and the people kept at the stove were never kept from thinking. We print her Spanish; the English is our translation.