The Larder: Food Studies Methods from the American South

PART 4 MATERIAL CULTURES

does a carrot grown today taste the same as one grown a hundred years ago? Do the pots, pans, and cookbooks of our past represent the most or least used kitchen equipment? How do we “read” the food story if we have only have photographs and postcards? Can we approximate the sights and sounds and smells of the markets, kitchens, and tables? Can we account for their codification of southern cuisines? The articles in this section argue that all of these approaches are possible when using material cultures to study southern foodways. A cast-iron pot from the 1890s; seven black-and-white photographs with unidentified subjects from the 1940s; and a collection of postcards depicting a vanished market of the 1820s: using these touchstones, Marcie Cohen Ferris, Psyche Williams-Forson, and Jessica B. Harris show us how to glean narratives from objects. Their insights answer a persistent challenge. In “Recipes for Reading,” a foundational 1989 piece published in the Modern Language Association’s journal, Susan Leonardi recognized that literature often describes and prioritizes food.Yet she worried over how to discuss it without erasing ephemeral smells, tactile responses, and pleasures. Other authors, fearful that food studies could become too descriptive or too theoretically removed, have called for a correction. In 2008 Gerard Fitzgerald and Gabriella Patrick, writing in the Journal of American History, reminded scholars of the importance of the palate in history as well as in food studies. They cautioned that studies must not lose theoretical sophistication. At a time when food studies still struggles for a balance in its methods, Ferris, Williams-Forson, Part 4 Material Cultures 274 Part 4 and Harris forge a middle ground in which the theoretical and the concrete are simultaneously present. From such a balance, productive intellectual questions emerge. In “The ‘Stuff’ of Southern Food: Food and Material Culture in the American South,” Ferris challenges us to look at “what lies beneath” the food, arguing that while comestibles spoil, objects remain.Walking through her mother-in-law’s Mississippi kitchen, Ferris notices that “a box of Texas grapefruit sits atop the beaten biscuit machine, alongside a large, worn wooden bowl.” To contextualize the objects located by archaeologists, museum curators, photographers, visual artists, and musicians, Ferris turns to social historians, folklorists, media and cultural studies scholars, and African American theorists. Psyche Williams-Forson is sympathetic to Ferris’s efforts to “read” the material objects, but she interjects cautions. In“‘Doing Our Part to Win the War’: Using Historical Photography to Understand African American Performances with Southern Food,” Williams-Forson presents a set of blackand -white photographs taken at a World War II training camp in Alabama. She proposes reading photographs against the background of the racial politics that contributed to their creation. Her aim is to “use the visual record to consider the range of underlying interactions that exceed the descriptions we are often given about food preparation, presentation, and consumption.” She urges all of us to seek the hidden transcripts in our sources. Can we read the silences? Does it matter if the silences are imposed by the white photographer, the army hierarchy, or the African American men who use such silences as protective cloaking to survive difficult situations? Williams-Forson answers with provisional affirmatives to all. In “The Market Women of Louisiana: An Aural and Visual Archeology,” Jessica B. Harris foregrounds a different issue of silence in the archives. She asks what we can know about the sounds, songs, and cadences of African American women in New Orleans’s early nineteenth-century markets.And why, she asks, are those sounds important? By turning to postcards, scraps of song in literature, and folk lyrics, Harris reconstructs the world of the market women who worked the urban squares of New Orleans. Scholars outside of food studies actively debate the role of the aural in humanities Material Cultures 275 research; Harris applies such methods to the sounds and songs of southern food, making clear that not all ephemera have been lost through the years. By exploring the tactile, the visual, and the aural—and by investigating carefully the silenced, erased, and forgotten—this section grounds our discussion of southern food methodology. Collectively, these essays remind us that, however theoretical our foodways discussions may be, food is a concrete object exchanged and consumed by physical bodies. To gain a full portrait of foodways import, we need to...