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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.1 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 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 accounts, 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 lead to shifting definitions of “wild” and “domesticated” food supply, as well as changes in our symbolic and metaphoric languages. Using game warden records, newspaper reports of noteworthy hunts, accounts of significant migrations, and scant traces of game in the region’s cookbooks, Prewitt theorizes practices and values.
The source materials useful for southern food studies are myriad. We can begin by examining the food and its documents. We can return to classic sources such as cookbooks, or we can gather previously overlooked community memories. From oral histories to sociological surveys, histories, and texts, we have only begun to explore the sources available to us.
NOTES
1. John Egerton, Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987, 1993); Arjun Appadurai, “How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 30, no. 1 (January 1988): 3–24; Sherrie Inness, Dinner Roles: American Women and Culinary Culture (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001); Anne Bower, ed., Recipes for Reading: Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997); Arlene Voski Avakian and Barbara Haber, eds., From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005).
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CHAPTER 1
“Everybody Seemed Willing to Help”
The Picayune Creole Cook Book as Battleground, 1900–2008
RIEN T. FERTEL
In 1900, for just twenty-five cents, a freshly published copy of the “compendium of our local culinary science … an authentic and complete account of the Creole kitchen” could be obtained from any New Orleans newsstand. The Picayune’s Creole Cook Book, boasted a promotional article in the Daily Picayune, would be “the first that has even been attempted, and probably the only one that can ever be made.” The demographics of New Orleans were shifting rapidly. The formerly enslaved people who toiled in the kitchens of their masters, including the many who continued to do so as freedwomen and men throughout the city, were fading away, and just “a few years more will witness the disappearance of the last one.” With the demise of this “race of Creole cooks,” the paper warned, New Orleans would lose “the secrets of the Louisiana Kitchen.” To combat this potential loss, an anonymous Daily Picayune staff member visited “the kitchen of more than one aristocratic Creole mansion in the district below Canal street.” The interviewer consulted “the old Creole ‘mammies’” and took down “from their lips the exact formulae by which the famous Creole dishes are prepared.” The Daily Picayune then sent the recopies of these black domestic workers to a chef, “A man whose knowledge of cookery is encyclopaediac [sic].” Once this male, presumably white, chef “vouched for the authenticity, and guaranteed the practicability of a receipt [recipe],” the dish would be added to the cook-book’s contents. Though the preparation of this recipe book hinged on methods and goals of power and knowledge, the Daily Picayune assured its readers that “everybody seemed willing to help.”1
Republished in sixteen later editions through 1989, the Picayune Creole Cook Book’s recipes have rarely changed. The introductory texts and illustrations, however, shifted over time to suit changing political, social, and cultural relationships in New Orleans, the South, and the nation. Editors of the cookbook repeatedly reordered the words and images within in order to assign and reassign authorship of these Creole recipes. Recipes were purportedly gathered community wide from those previously appearing in the paper, and from family cooks and leading restaurant chefs.2 But the cookbook’s recipes, as with its compilers and editors, always appeared anonymously. By ascribing authorship to a recipe collection without a true author and ownership to a Creolized culinary culture with historically ambiguous origins, this cookbook reinterpreted the history of New Orleans and accredited dominion over the city’s Creole culture. The Picayune Creole Cook Book became a Crescent City urtext, “a compendium of food customs, race relations, religious observations, and festivals … to countless men and women.”3 This essay will examine the roles “everybody” (editors, cooks, and readers) played in constructing race, ethnicity, class, and gender relations within the Picayune.
The Picayune Creole Cook Book’s publication history proceeded in four distinct phases. The first four editions (1900, 1901, 1906, 1910), originally labeled The Picayune’s Creole Cook Book, reinforced white southern racism by incorporating contemporary moonlight-and-magnolias imagery. Though this book was written with the white female consumer in mind, these earliest editions granted agency to a mammy character as chief cook, the creator of recipes within the kitchen and, thus, within the text. The second phase comprised a sole printing. The 1916 edition was characterized by a marked shift in the assigned authorship of recipes from the femininity of the household private sphere to the masculinity of the private restaurant kitchen. Here culinary proprietorship changed hands from African American female domestics to white (mostly) male professional chefs and businessmen. The sixth and seventh editions (1922 and 1928) encompassed the most progressive years in the cookbook’s history. In the interwar period the book’s text ascribed multiple peoples and cultures—as well as the reaffirmation of African American women—as architects of New Orleans’s culinary heritage. From 1936 onward (1938, 1942, 1945, 1947, 1954, 1966, 1971) the Creole Cook Book reverted to a standardized white, male-centric historical narrative of New Orleans cooking. It was not until the last two editions (1987 and 1989) that this racialized and gendered history disappeared.
Though the Picayune Creole Cook Book saw frequent representational changes throughout its nearly century-long publication history, every edition contained two interconnected ideas. The Cook Book promoted the exceptionality of New Orleans cuisine and culture. In June 1929 the Times-Picayune advertised the “famous recipes of the aristocratic” French and Spanish “emigres.” The dishes of their “gastronomic culture,” though now centuries old, had “retained their popularity because of their superior tastiness.”4 For another local commentator, it “is cooking, the art that sets us apart,” and not Mardi Gras or jazz music, that marks “the joy of life in New Orleans.”5 Not only were New Orleans’s Creole cooking and culture uniquely superior to other American forms, they were slowly slipping into dissolution. The city’s cuisine and its practitioners were “now rapidly becoming extinct,” according to the original advertisement that introduced the cookbook.6 The cookbook blamed changing social conditions and gender norms, as well as the Americanization and modernization of the kitchen. These thematic threads of exceptionality and extinction are hardly unique to the Picayune Creole Cook Book. Since the publication of the first Creole cookbooks in 1885, nearly every interpreter—insiders and outsiders both—of the city’s cooking style has boasted that “New Orleans cuisine is unique, without a doubt.”7 Lafcadio Hearn, compiler of one of the 1885 cookbooks, contrasted “the mysteries” of the Creole kitchen with those recipes found in “the average cook-book.”8 Concurrently, gourmands have invariably stressed that Creole cooking needs to be rescued from oblivion. The second 1885 cookbook, written by a religious women’s organization, cautioned that New Orleans and the South were being overtaken by a proliferation of northern recipe collections.9 Defenders of New Orleans’s culinary culture have seen that culture as under threat and worth saving, a sentiment forcefully made in the Times-Picayune...
