The Larder: Food Studies Methods from the American South

PART 1 COOKBOOKS AND INGREDIENTS

john egerton kicked off the modern era of southern food studies with an epic regional road trip. He catalogued the recipes, cookbooks, restaurants , and forgotten cooks of the region. In 1987’s Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History, he foreshadowed the concentration on cookbooks and recipes that has since dominated food studies.In the popular vein,Scott Peacock, a white Alabamian, and Edna Lewis, a black Virginian, wrote a 2003 book, The Gift of Southern Cooking, that made connections across races, eras, and stereotypes. Cookbooks have been helpful in building theoretical frameworks for judging when and where national or regional cuisines emerge,as anthropologist Arjun Appadurai did in his 1988 study“How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India.” Cookbooks have been central to the feminist and gender studies of Sherrie Inness, Anne Bower, and contributors to the collection From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies. In recent years, studies of recipes have gotten stuck in the mire. Questions of intent and audience have been the focus. We believe there is more to explore in the recipes, ingredients, and cooking practices of the region. Rien Fertel, Rebecca Sharpless, David Shields, and Wiley Prewitt open these avenues of exploration. Sometimes we should, in fact, judge a book by its cover, as Rien Fertel demonstrates in“‘Everybody Seemed Willing to Help’: The Picayune Creole Cook Book as Battleground,1900–2008.”Fertel highlights one edition of this New Orleans cookbook, featuring a smiling male chef on the dust jacket. (He was likely white.) Underneath the dust jacket, engraved on the boards of the book itself, remained an image of a black woman, inspired by an Part 1 Cookbooks and Ingredients 8 Part 1 earlier edition of the book. As metaphor, the imbricated images allow Fertel to explore the changing definitions of race, ethnicity, Creolization, and community on New Orleans palates and in local social hierarchies. Fertel interrogates meanings beyond mere recipes when he sketches profiles of the various contributions from writers and readers of the Times-Picayune newspaper. Thorny questions persist for readers interested in community cookbooks produced in the South: What do we make of the very brief attributions of individual recipes? What can we ask if all we have is a woman’s name at the end of a recipe? Was she making a statement about race, class, gender, or ethnicity? Did she join with fellow contributors to police the boundaries of society or community through the cookbook? Or did she hope to open those boundaries? Rebecca Sharpless applies the tools of social historians to provide one answer in “The Women of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church Were Worried.” She examines an 1888 cookbook from Waco, Texas, and its subsequent updated editions. Using church records, telephone directories, community interviews , letters, and diaries, she reconstructs the social history of the women who produced the cookbook. Sharpless uses stories of missionary trips to explain the inclusion of Asian recipes. She recovers networks of political appointments to clarify the role of celebrities in the cookbooks. She traces employment records and addresses of contributors to understand the racial hierarchies undergirding how women’s names are listed under their recipes. That final detail, which becomes a map of the racial politics among domestic workers, established white families, and newly arrived residents, proves that the relatively terse narratives in community cookbooks can and should be the objects of scholarship. Sometimes the most interesting questions come from stepping back and readjusting the frame of study. David Shields performs such a move in “Prospecting for Oil.” Rather than focus on the cuisines that coalesced in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Shields wonders what agricultural breakthroughs informed the dishes and recipes of that era. He finds some answers in coastal, agricultural communities of South Carolina as they worked to produce a sustainable source of cooking oil. Scanning early cookbooks, newspapers, general store records, and plantation ac- Cookbooks and Ingredients 9 counts, Shields documents both the failures and successes that were later erased in blanket directions to “heat oil in large skillet” or “grease pan and preheat it.” Frequently politicized but rarely analyzed,hunting is the subject of “Bodies of the Dead: The Wild in Southern Foodways,” by Wiley Prewitt. Examining what was hunted,how substantially,by whom,and to what ends,Prewitt asks questions about the changing relationship of humans and animals in the U.S. South. Such questions...