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The Signifying Dish: Autobiography and History in Two Black Women’s Cookbooks
Author(s): Rafia Zafar
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Source: Feminist Studies, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Summer, 1999), pp. 449-469
Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc.
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THE SIGNIFYING DISH:
AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND HISTORY IN TWO
BLACK WOMEN’S COOKBOOKS
RAFIA ZAFAR
The Black woman cook-overweight, decked out in snowy apron,
undisputed genius of the American kitchen-is an image too well
inscribed on the collective American unconscious. One southern
culinary historian, John Egerton, concisely describes this difficultto-eradicate
stereotype:
They [Black women chefs] were “turbaned mammies” and “voodoo magicians”
and “tyrants” who ruled the back rooms with simpleminded power; they could
work culinary miracles day in and day out, but couldn’t for the life of them tell
anyone how they did it. Their most impressive dishes were described as “accidental”
rather than planned. Their speech, humorously conveyed in demeaning
dialect in many an old cookbook, came across as illiterate folk knowledge
and not to be taken seriously.’
These buffoonish characters were the fictive counterparts of legions
of unknown culinary workers, African Americans whose
legacy and labor shaped much of what we eat to this day.2 Yet
these historical chefs continue to be overshadowed by the longrunning
specter of the mammy-cook.3 As folklorist Patricia Turner
asks, in her analysis of the production and reproduction of
“mammy” kitchen artifacts: “What price has been exacted from
the real black women who have been forced to make their way in
a culture that pays homage to a distorted icon?”4 This disjunction-between
the spurious worship of an unlettered genius Black
cook5 and that figure’s long absence within what I call the “kitchens
of power”-leads to still another question, posed by Quandra
Prettyman: If “Black cooks are familiar figures in our national
mythology as well as in our national history … [why is it] so few
have produced cookbooks”?6 The beginnings of an answer lie in
the difficulty of writing a book that engages simultaneously with
the shadows of Black slavery, servitude, and oppression, the perFeminist
Studies 25, no. 2 (summer 1999). ? 1999 by Feminist Studies, Inc.
449
450 Rafia Zafar
sistence of stereotypes, and the practicalities of cooking.7
To write and to cook-to participate in a national discourse about
food and eating-leads the Black woman into territory loaded with
conflicting meanings: for a twentieth-century African American
female publicly to announce herself as a cook means that she must
engage with the reigning ghosts of American racism; she must
tackle literally visceral ideas with metaphor, individual agency,
and historical memory. The Black woman cook must always engage
with these sites of memory-or lieux des memoires-when writing
about specific foods. As Genevieve Fabre and Robert O’Meally
observe, such African American lieux des memoires “prompt both
the processes of imaginative recollection and the historical consciousness
… [they] stand at the nexus of personal and collective
memory.”8 Meanings are assigned by people, and those items can
be specific places or foods common to many. Each recalled or recreated
dish in a community’s cuisine signifies mightily, and the
multiple readings of a simple dish of rice, greens, and meat reveal
past and present worlds in which race and culture define our
very taste buds. In this lies the quandary of the Black woman
who would write a cookbook: even if Aunt Jemima’s image on
the pancake-mix box has been updated, has the consciousness of
American consumers been similarly revised? Popularly held misconceptions
about Black cooks haunt, consciously or not, the
African American woman, whether she is a chef or an author.
When negotiating the intersections of memory, history, food, and
creativity, well might the Black woman author ask: In writing a
recipe, can one also right history?
In the 1970s, following the crest of the Black Power movement,
two works appeared that take on the figure of the Black woman
cook and her problematic heritage, Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor’s
Vibration Cooking: Or the Travel-Notes of a Geechee Girl (1970) and
Carole and Norma Jean Darden’s Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine:
Recipes and Reminiscences of a Family (1978).9 These two cookbooks,
which have now attained near-cult status, help us understand
how a recipe collection functions as an articulation of a personal
and/or communal identity. Each text works as autobiography and
history in addition to engaging, obliquely or not, the linked issues
of Black stereotyping and class. They also operate simultaneously
on gastronomic and historical levels. Both illustrate the ways
Black culinary traditions can be imagined or inscribed-by the au-
Rafia Zafar 451
thor, by her readers-as a way of enacting the cultural, expressive,
and historical agenda of the African American female. Along
with how-tos, the Dardens and Smart-Grosvenor give us whys;
presenting these cookbooks to a national audience, Smart-Grosvenor
and the Dardens enact a gastronomic Black Reconstruction.
A little background first, for a reconstruction implies a previous
edifice. The first cookbook by a Black woman, Abby Fisher’s
ghostwritten What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking,
appeared in 1881. Despite the straightforward culinary instruction
explicit in a cookbook, Fisher’s personal life and historical situation
as a Black woman intrudes. Autobiographical and historical
information comes in the form of asides, as when the former
southerner concludes her last recipe with the words “I have given
birth to eleven children and raised them all, and nursed them
with this diet. It is a Southern plantation preparation.”‘” However
firmly Abby Fisher tried to keep out the world beyond her
kitchen, her life as a Black woman erupted into her professional
presentations. In the twentieth century, the setting down of
recipes grew beyond Fisher’s early efforts to keep it simple to
recipes unabashedly presented alongside community histories,
family memoirs, and autobiography.
Increasingly, Black cookbooks written after the 1940s function
as recoveries or recastings of an African American world. The National
Council of Negro Women sponsored a number of such culinary
celebrations of community, beginning in 1958 with the Historical
Cookbook of the American Negro.” In the post-World War II
era, authors find food, politics, and history increasingly hard to
separate from one another.12 The civil rights movement of the
1950s eventually led to the massive civil disobedience and increasingly
aggressive activism of the 1960s; this upswing in political
activism led to a burgeoning market for Black subjects. The
subsequent increase in African American-owned presses after
1960 attests to the growing market for books by and about African
Americans.’3 With this increased number of Black publications
overall came a rise in the genres published-and a growing
number of African American cookbooks. Latter volumes, such as
A Good Heart and Light Hand: Ruth L. Gaskins’ Collection of Traditional
Negro Recipes (1968), often explored and celebrated group
452 Rafia Zafar
identity through relatively straightforward collections of recipes.”4
But two works that followed A Good Heart and a Light Hand encapsulate
the era’s heady mix of politics and the personal.
The Dardens and Smart-Grosvenor volumes engagingly reflect
the creative and political consciousness of the 1960s. The wellworn
cliche of the women’s movement-the personal is politicalbecomes
more than an assertion of female rights when in Vibration
Cooking the forthright Smart-Grosvenor unrestrainedly asserts
that for too long Caucasians have been dictating who’s in charge
of the American kitchen: “White folks act like they invented food
and like there is some weird mystique surrounding it-something
that only Julia [Child] and Jim [James Beard] can get to. There is
no mystique. Food is food. Everybody eats!” (p. 3). At the same
time Smart-Grosvenor notes that whites have heretofore controlled
the kitchen economy, she points out that all people must
eat. Implicit in this leveling observation is her assertion that one
group does not “own” a set of recipes, despite the apparent primacy
of plantation cookbooks over “soul food” collections. Anne E.
Goldman reaches a similar conclusion when she observes that in
the kitchen, women of different races and classes do not easily fall
into sisterhood.’5 Although less confrontational in approach than
Smart-Grosvenor, the Dardens, in Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine,
also do not fail to inform their reader-cooks that the legacy of slavery
and racism affects even the foods we remember: despite the
numerous family members the Dardens could contact for recipes,
they “could not trace [their] family roots past [their] grandparents
…
such was the effect of slavery and its resulting destruction of
family ties” (p. xi). But if the Dardens and Smart-Grosvenor similarly
weave a love of cooking and eating around the markers of
slavery, family pride, and the civil rights movement, the differences
between the two cookbooks demonstrate generational shifts
within the Black community as well as the class divisions that
have become more marked at the end of the twentieth century:
the Dardens can be seen as showcasing the elegant side of southern
cooking along with more informal cooking styles, while
Smart-Grosvenor’s folksy tone and simplified recipes seem to
privilege classic soul food, although her volume is far more complicated
than that rubric would imply. These two cookbooks
demonstrate that African America was, by the 1970s, quite diversified
in terms of class, educational achievement, and region.’6
Rafia Zafar 453
Yet the class issue remains for Black women cooks and authors,
whatever their educational achievement and household income.
In a society long arranged around a binary opposition between
white and Black, free and slave, the middle-class status of African
Americans continues to be contested in any number of arenas. Because
of this long-standing link between racial (e.g., Black) and
economic (e.g., lower) status in the United States, Black women
and their cookbooks come across as less “high culture” than the
popular American guides to French or Italian cuisine which
crowd the “Cookery” shelves of bookstores and libraries.’7 There
are class issues hidden within the very existence of a cookbook,
an artifact commonly held to be a “woman’s thing” in general. Although
such works are said largely to appeal to “women” as a
group, women themselves are stratified in terms of race and class
as any number of feminist scholars have argued. Individual
working-class women (and men), as for many generations were
the vast majority of African Americans, are less likely to write,
compile, or even read recipe books, if only because their work
and financial situations militate against leisure-time activities like
“gourmet” cooking.”8 African American women cooks, then, operate
within overlapping systems-mainstream, or “white” and culturally
specific, or “Black”-that define their class positions in contradictory
ways.
Both the Dardens and Smart-Grosvenor recognize that there is
neither a monolithic Black culture nor a single African American
cuisine, although each of their productions play up and against
prevalent notions of what “Black” food is (and is not). The subtitles
of each book reveal their individual and distinctive agendas:
Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine: Recipes and Reminiscences of a Family
invites us into a procession of middle-class homes for fruit
wines, hot baked goods, and comfortable living. Vibration Cooking,
or, the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl heralds the author’s unorthodox
approach to life: Smart-Grosvenor cooks with tradition and
intuition together, with a global roster of recipes enhancing her
picaresque adventures in the rural South, inner-city Philadelphia,
France, and Cuba. The Dardens deliver a gastronomic social history
of African America, emphasizing nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century
ideals of racial uplift in the face of adversity. As
Anne E. Goldman has noted that “if the Dardens are intent on
providing their own middle-class status with an historical prece-
454 Rafia Zafar
dent, they are equally interested in providing ignorant readers
with lessons in nineteenth-century American history.”19 SmartGrosvenor
offers an idiosyncratic, wisecracking, personal narrative
of the changes wrought in contemporary Black America. If
Vibration Cooking’s unabashed first-person narrative creates an autobiography
through meals, Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine’s text,
with sepia-toned pictures, can better be called a keepsake or an
archive. Each set of culinary reminiscences captures a moment in
Afro-American history. Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine can, at
times, seem an idealized version of Black life-the now-familiar
lament that segregation had its positive side, in the enforced
closeness of Black community life, comes to mind. Vibration Cooking,
on the other hand, comes across like a Zora Neale Hurston of
the culinary set.20 As the late 1970s arrived, desegregation had
been achieved-at least as far as the courts were concerned-and
increasing numbers of African Americans entered the enclaves of
formerly all-white institutions. Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine
and Vibration Cooking can therefore be seen as late-twentieth-century
Black cultural events, expressions of the prevailing winds of
change.
Vibration Cooking, the first of this pair of cookbooks, comes as a
high-water mark of the nexus of Black Power and cuisine.21 SmartGrosvenor
consciously counterwrites those generations-old images
of overweight Black geniuses who presided over generations
of southern kitchens with nary a written-down recipe.22 Before
she offers a single how-to, the author engages pointedly with
these ever-present myths, when she dedicates her work “to my
mama and my grandmothers and my sisters in appreciation of
the years that they worked in miss ann’s kitchen and then came
home to TCB in spite of slavery and oppression and the moynihan
report” (p. v).23 Whom the U.S. mainstream would categorize
and pigeonhole, Smart-Grosvenor will liberate through scathing
commentary, family history, humor, and personal letters. Her
recipes, related in a contemporary African American vernacular,
place the Black cook in a community of women who like to whip
things up-for themselves, for their families, for their lovers. These
recipes are not for Miss Ann’s kitchen: cooking as domestic service
is invoked only to be scorned.
Vibration Cooking impresses upon the reader the necessity to
eradicate culinary racism along with other kinds of bigotry. In the
Rafia Zafar 455
introduction, entitled “The Demystification of Food,” SmartGrosvenor
writes:
In reading lots and lots of cookbooks written by white folks it occurred to me
that people very casually say Spanish rice, French fries, Italian spaghetti, Chinese
cabbage … with the exception of black bottom pie and niggertoes [Brazil
nuts], there is no reference to black people’s contributions to the culinary arts.
(P. 3)
The introduction to the second edition extends the above critique
to tell us that “the white folks were on my case” about the original
edition of Vibration Cooking. Mainstream readers seemed puzzled,
Smart-Grosvenor avers, by the frank mixing of culinary and
political motives. Her cookbook includes a more than ancillary
running commentary on Black life in the white United States,
whether complaining about “the segregation of ethnic foods in supermarkets
… [w]hy can’t the mango juice be with the tomato
juice [and not in] some ‘exotic’ section” (p. 197) or including an entire
chapter about the Black person’s inability to hail a taxicab in
Manhattan (pp. 95-97). Preceding a recipe for her paternal uncle’s
corn muffins, Smart-Grosvenor’s readers hear why her father was
called “a bad nigger” by a southern white and how a racial slur
can actually amuse, if not left-handedly compliment, the father
and his child (pp. 42-43). In a chapter entitled “Name-Calling,”
she enumerates the culinary imperialism inherent in the renaming
of foods like okra (the original African word is gombo) or succotash
(Smart-Grosvenor uses an Indian spelling, “sukquttash”).
Although she includes in that chapter a recipe for “Cracker Stew,”
whose ingredients perform a veritable culinary dozens, SmartGrosvenor
admits she does not generally “call people out of their
name” (p. 85). Her disdain for things “white” is complicated, for
she can not simply dismiss European culture. Instead, when and
wherever possible, she asserts the superiority of the African
American.
That desire to refocus American gastronomic history leads
Smart-Grosvenor to invoke and then to discard the legacy of expatriate
American cookbook author and memoirist Alice B. Toklas.
Both Smart-Grosvenor and Toklas can be termed “unconventional”
if we agree they each lived in defiance of white middle-class
heterosexual U.S. culture: Toklas as a lesbian whose lifelong partner
was the writer Gertrude Stein; Smart-Grosvenor as a Black
American refusing to be channeled into either the stuffy re-
456 Rafia Zafar
spectability of the American Negro middle class or the still-segregated
bohemian life of the American abroad. When Smart-Grosvenor
mimics white readers asking, “Was I trying to be a black
Alice B. Toklas?” she snaps, “the only thing I have in common
with Alice B. Toklas is that we lived on the same street in Paris
[the rue de Fleurus]. I lived at #17 and she at #27″ (p. xvi).24 That
backhanded reference to Toklas makes the comparison between
two American cooks living on the rue de Fleurus unavoidable:
Parisian-dwelling, American expatriates, Smart-Grosvenor and
Toklas each record a smart set of renowned visitors and their
amusing anecdotes. Despite their differences in social class, both
women moved in a vigorous and exhilarating community of expressive
artists.25 As opposed to Toklas, whose text often included
the sayings of Gertrude Stein, Smart-Grosvenor never alludes
directly to her husband or any other long-term partner. In lieu of
a famous lover’s words she records her own bon mots and wisecracks
and those of her children, Chandra and Kali (“My daughter
said, ‘My mamma cook like Aretha Franklin sing!”‘ (p. xv).
Her sense of worth, most decidedly, does not turn on being an
observer of the greats and near-greats of U.S. cultural history.26
Yet recipes and commentary in Vibration Cooking and The Alice B.
Toklas Cookbook invite their readers to be impressed by the writers’
creative connections. Both authors make a connection between
gastronomy and artistic achievement: meals celebrate novelists,
“Chicken Carlene Polite” (Vibration Cooking, p. 165); painters,
“Oeufs Francis Picabia” (in Toklas); or musicians-Virgil Thompson
contributes a recipe for “shad roe mousse” (in Toklas) while
Donald Hubbard worries about a “soul food party … in Rome”
(Vibration Cooking, p. 74).27 By writing about African American
food in such venues as France and Italy, Smart-Grosvenor implicitly
acknowledges European connections and affiliations. Yet like
many other African Americans, she tries to keep a distance from
“white” ancestry. To affirm “down-home” food in the belly of
“Western civilization” thus keeps Smart-Grosvenor’s priorities as
Black activist clear.
Smart-Grosvenor’s reluctance to admit kinship with Toklas
stems not from an inability to admit a connection with a white
predecessor-she does refer to her, after all-but from her much
greater desire to form a chain of Black women forebears.28 When
she introduces a “white” dish and then replaces it with a “Black”
Rafia Zafar 457
analogue, Smart-Grosvenor performs a Black female signifying
(or, she might say, a “hurting”) on white gourmet foods: her comparisons
of crepes with her grandmother’s hoe cakes and “Pancakes
Smith St. Jacques” exemplify this culinary revisionism (pp.
22, 23). She would have us recognize that it is from Black women
cooks and writers that she draws her courage and inspiration; the
geechee girl’s kitchen and life frankly seek out connections with
women, with all peoples, of the African Diaspora. Smart-Grosvenor
acknowledges those who have come, and cooked, before
her. African American culinary colleagues like Edna Lewis and
Ruth Gaskins receive high praise; so too does she praise the famous,
if less self-consciously aesthetic, A Date with a Dish: A Cookbook
of American Negro Recipes. A scandalized Smart-Grosvenor
notes that few cookbooks by Afro-Americans appeared before the
first edition of Vibration Cooking-this despite the fact that “AfroAmerican
cooking is like jazz-a genuine art form that deserves
serious scholarship” (p. xviii).29 Her assertion that cooking, like
other forms of nonliterate artistic expression, merits scholarly attention
anticipated scholarship in women’s and cultural studies of
African America. Still, the multiple genres of Vibration Cooking-its
letters, its recipes, its narrative excursions-assert Smart-Grosvenor’s
personal agenda over a strictly academic or historical one.
In Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine, the Darden sisters take their
cooking less autobiographically-or, I should say, more historiographically.
If the welter of different texts offered by SmartGrosvenor
presents an individual’s unique experiences along
with her recipes, the carefully researched and kitchen-tested
recipes of several generations of Dardens and Sampsons attest to
a belief that the individual is inextricable from the larger community
and continuum of Black folks.30 So when a friend of the two
sisters inquires, “didn’t their black Americanfamily, deeply rooted
in the experiences of slavery and rural life, have rich material on
genuine American cookery?” the sisters answer yes (p. ix; emphasis
mine). Further realizing that many of the wonderful dishes
they “had taken for granted” were more real to them than the relatives
dispersed across generations and regions, they decided to
put together a cookbook. For these women, a compendium of
loved foods would be inextricable from recapturing past African
American life; to do so properly would result in a “thick description”
of a past age.”3 Thus, Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine is literal-
458 Rafia Zafar
ly “a testimonial to those who lovingly fed us and at the same time
gave us a better sense of ourselves by sharing themselves” (p. xi).
Unsurprisingly, along with those earliest remembered bites
came their identity as African Americans.32 Northern raised and
Sarah Lawrence educated, the two sisters must recapture their
culinary and familial antecedents through travel to distant relatives,
specifically referring to their travels as “our pilgrimage
‘home’ ” (p. xi). They visit neighbors in small southern towns; pick
through boxes of photographs; and collect, try out, and standardize
old recipe cards. As one might expect from a cookbook cum
history, statements from historical personages abound-except
here the statements come from surviving relatives and old friends
of the family. Rather than Smart-Grosvenor’s savory stew of old
and new recipes, letters from friends, and bohemian Black arts
hobnobbing, the Dardens re-create course by formal course a
lived experience they see vanishing with increased social mobility,
desegregation, and distance from slavery. Theirs is not an autobiography
in the sense of a telling of their own, individual cooking
stories, although some of those are included-we have only to
compare the number of recipes culled from older relatives with
the ones the Dardens themselves contribute to see where the emphasis
in Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine lies. As the youngest
contributors to the volume, the Dardens subsume their culinary
narratives within a larger history, that of their maternal and paternal
ancestors-and by extension, within the greater context of
African American history.
Within the covers of their cookbook the sisters divide one side
of the family from another, mapping out their genealogy and giving
credit for each recipe where due (each branch of the Sampsons
and the Dardens is neatly delineated). Carefully planned,
every chapter refers specifically to a family member; accompanying
photographs and reminiscences heighten the succulence and
significance of the recipes within. Following a brief biography of
the only grandparent they ever knew, the sisters append adaptations
of granddad Sampson’s honey-based recipes-“Fruited
Honey Chicken,” “Honey Duck,” “Honey Custard,” even “Cough
Syrup” (pp. 148-51). Memories of their travels in the segregated
South as young girls precede a picnic menu; dishes by various
friends, old and new, who gave them food and shelter are provided
as well-“Hot Crab Meat Salad” and “Edna Neil’s Pan-Fried
Rafia Zafar 459
Blowfish” (pp. 248, 249). That so many of those whose recipes are
included, or to whom chapters are dedicated, were elderly or deceased
at the time of the book’s composition lends an elegiac tone
to the cookbook. Although far from a eulogy for a vanished African
America, Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine strikes a nostalgic
note absent from Vibration Cooking.
Thoughts of [our uncle] J.B. conjure up images of big shiny cars, polished twotoned
shoes, straw hats tipped to the side, and the continual party that always
seemed to be going on around him … he was a cook [who] … preferred to eat
his “dinner” first thing in the morning….. (P. 53)
The wistful tone struck in more than one entry could almost lead
one to believe that this cookbook was specifically aimed at those
who attended northern and/or integrated schools, grew up away
from an extended Black family, and who acknowledge an everwidening
gap between the Black working class and the bourgeoisie.33
Although segregation of a different character remains,
the current dilemma leaves African Americans of the poorest
families almost as insulated from the middle-class Black world as
the two races had once been. That separation leads to a key, if almost
prosaic, agenda of these cookbooks. Along with the invocation
of time past or a radical manifesto, Spoonbread and Strawberry
Wine and Vibration Cooking must offer specific remedies and recourse
for those readers yearning to [re]create Black community,
if not an African American identity, through gastronomic venues.
There are those, however, who have neither the time nor the
knowledge to prepare the labor-intensive and classic dishes of
African American cuisine with which the Dardens concern themselves.
Working parents with attenuated links to an older generation-and
restricted free time-might just as soon purchase precooked
African American food as prepare it themselves; they
might also limit time-consuming, home-cooked meals to Sunday
dinners.34 The owner of an Atlanta chain of drive-in chitlins
restaurants notes that “doctors, lawyers, all kinds of people … remember”
this and other foods of their youth and come to buy.35
Others far from Georgia’s drive-ins with “the yearning for collard
or turnip greens” can now “pick a few cans off the [supermarket]
shelf’: at least two companies, including a side venture of New
York City’s famed “Sylvia’s” restaurant, offer Black culture in a
can.36 Do not such businesses thrive in part not just because busy
people appreciate the convenience of prepared foods but also because
growing numbers of African Americans no longer know
460 Rafia Zafar
how to cook chitlins (and other gastronomic relics)? Perhaps, too,
the younger members of contemporary Black America do not
want to eat foods identified with the past and privation: “I don’t
know what they are, but they’re something nasty.””37 As older
Black women turn away from the stereotypes of the Black cook,
so might younger African Americans eschew meals associated
with want.38 Some Black folks turn to takeout, adjusting in that
way to the fact that “soul food” and “home cooking” may no
longer appear under the same roof. Others, with the time or the
inclination, will go to the elongating shelf of Black cookbookswhere
Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine and Vibration Cooking now
have the status of brand names.
The ways the Dardens and Smart-Grosvenor treat a traditional
African American holiday, New Year’s Day, and its signature soul
food dish, Hoppin’ John, illustrate what each offers to the reader
in search of community and cuisine. (Such New Year’s celebrations,
as expressions of an African American identity, date back to
the early nineteenth century.)39 The homely dish of Hoppin’ John
has been said to be named after a limping New Orleans slave who
sold the dish or the children who hopped around the table begging
for a taste.” The making of this plain fare sends the Dardens
and Smart-Grosvenor down parallel memory lanes. The two sisters
tell us:
On New Year’s Day we always have Open House at our father’s home. It is a
leisurely day, designed to give us an opportunity to unwind from the frenzy
of New Year’s Eve … Black folklore has it that hoppin’ john brings good luck
in the coming year, so we always serve this … with all the essential trimmings.
(P. 223)
As is typical, the Dardens link food, history, and folklore; their
Hoppin’ John, which they take care to subtitle “Black Eyed Peas
and Rice,” contains rice, peas, red and black pepper, ham hocks,
bay leaf, onions, celery stalk, and salt. By placing the dish in the
context of Black American culture, as well as providing exact instructions,
the Dardens hope to ensure that their readers’ attempts
at gastronomic and ethnic revival will turn out successfully.
Smart-Grosvenor also does not fail to connect black-eyed peas
and rice with New Year’s Day, although the link she forges does
not necessarily connect folklore and family. Instead, she recollects
Rafia Zafar 461
those New Year’s open houses I used to have and everyone I loved would
come. Even Millie came from Germany one year. She arrived just in time for
the black eyes and rice. And that year I cooked the peas with beef neck bones
instead of swine cause so many brothers and sisters have given up swine. I
had ham hocks on the side for the others.
….
If you eat … (Hopping John) on
New Year’s Day, you supposed to have good luck for the coming year. Black
people been eating that traditional New Year’s Day dinner for years. That’s
why I’m not having no more open house on New Year’s Day. I’m going to try
something new. (Pp. 5, 6)
For this cook, strict adherence to tradition should not overrule the
spirit of the occasion. Accordingly, Smart-Grosvenor’s ingredients
and recipe can be included in four short lines:
Cook black-eyed peas.
When they are almost done add rice.
Mix rice and peas together.
Season and-voila!-you got it. (P. 6)
So although she gives you a recipe for Hopping John, she prefaces
it with her explanation of why she omits the pork (mainly because
the prevailing Black ethos eschewed pig meat as the food of
poverty and antithetical to a Muslim lifestyle), leaves the seasoning
up to her audience (because she and the reader should cook
by vibration), and intimates, more or less, that she plans to skip it
entirely on subsequent Firsts (because she won’t be bound by the
past). Smart-Grosvenor wants to ensure continuity, the cook’s
own sense of integrity, and innovation simultaneously.41 Still, she
will not break with some traditions-nothing so newfangled as
Teflon “can’t fry no fried chicken” (p. 4). For this cook, only the
cast-iron pots, if not the classic dishes, of her girlhood will do.4
Once, in response to an earlier version of this article, a colleague
replied testily, “Who ever thought ‘African American food’
was ‘just grits and greens’ anyway?” Although there may be some
who believe African Americans subsist on corn meal and leafy
vegetables, that remark speaks as much to intragroup notions
about the food of rural Black southerners (not to mention urban
Black northerners) as to that of the Dardens’ or Smart-Grosvenor’s
implied readership. To deny that these items were common because
of the poverty-stricken conditions of much of African
America is to deny the past. It is also to deny a link with the continent.
To identify greens as a cornerstone of Black cuisine doesn’t
mean that there is one African American culinary tradition. Jessica
B. Harris, noted scholar of African diasporic cuisine, has delin-
462 Rafia Zafar
eated two “major African-American culinary traditions … that of
the dirt-poor, hardscrabble Deep South … [and the one that]
harked back to the kitchens of Virginia plantations manned by
house slaves who turned spits, put up preserves, and served elegant
meals.”43 (She would agree that there are further minor and
regional variations.) Both major traditions incorporate cooked
greens as a standard dish. So although Black American cuisine is
certainly more than “grits and greens,” those “lowly” dishes signify
mightily. The eating of collards has meaning in ways analogous
to the eating of parsley from a modem-day seder plate: for
Jews and Blacks alike, the ingestion of bitter greens serves as a
near-literal taste of slavery. With each group’s shared food comes
a shared identity, if not a shared fate. As Pierre Bourdieu has observed:
“Taste is amor fati, the choice of destiny, but a forced
choice, produced by conditions of existence which rule out all alternatives
as mere daydreams and leave no choice but the taste
for the necessary.”” Ironically, and sometimes triumphantly, what
we have to eat we come to prefer.
For most African Americans, greens have a content beyond B
vitamins and iron: “greens are undeniably one of the United
States’ best known African inspired foods”; they “go into the pot
boiling on the back of the stove in a traditional Black American
household.”45 Unsurprisingly, the Dardens present their readers
with three headings under greens: Mixed Greens, Collard Greens,
and “Pot Likker.” Noting that their father “eats greens every day,
so he always makes them in quantity and reheats them during
the week” (p. 136), the Dardens offer recipes that yield between
twelve and sixteen servings. By not dividing the recipe for their
readers, the sisters implicitly affirm the foundational place of
cooked greens in Black American cuisine. Going on to speak of
the value of pot likker, the leftover cooking liquid, the sisters remark:
“It is renowned for its nutritional value and can be used as
an excellent vegetable stock for soups, as a soup in its own right,
or traditionally to dunk corn bread” (p. 137).46 Giver of vitamins
and representative of folk custom, greens serve as side dish and
symbol.
Smart-Grosvenor, who could well be called a gastronomic
Afrocentrist, celebrates greens in a mixed message of nutrition
and nationalism. In a chapter titled “Collards and Other Greens”
she discusses the various aspects of this food. They are, “accord-
Rafia Zafar 463
ing to the National Geographic … prehistoric. The Romans took
them to France and England. The Romans are said to have considered
them a delicacy. I know I consider them a delicacy. They
are very rich in minerals and vitamins” (p. 139). Two exchanges
occurring during greens-buying expeditions further illustrate her
conflation of provender and politics. When shopping in her
Lower East Side Manhattan neighborhood, Smart-Grosvenor has
an unpleasant deja vu when the person of color wrapping her
greens (in her adulthood it is a Puerto Rican man; in her childhood
it was a Black man) does not also take her money. That the
white store owner deems this employee good only to wrap vegetables
offends his proudly Black customer: she vows to shop in
Harlem for her greens henceforth, even if it means taking a long
subway ride (p. 141). The echo of boycotts, of lunch-counter sitins,
would not have been missed by her contemporaries-nor
should we. In a second incident, when a white shopper asks,
“How do you people fix these [greens]?” Smart-Grosvenor wields
humor, not her spending power, as a lance. The woman’s patronizing
epithet, “you people,” provokes a mischievous reply. Our intrepid
chef announces, with a straight face, that African Americans
make salad with collards using “Italian” dressing. Nearby, “a black
woman … looked at me as if I had discredited the race” (p. xvii).
With eleven recipes given for these common vegetables, Vibration
Cooking affirms the author’s belief in the tastiness, curative powers,
and unshakable place of greens in Black American life.
“Black” foods like collards and Hopping John may be prepared
differently from year to year, and what might be considered “soul
food” has indeed changed from its inception.47 Nevertheless, the
entity known as African American cuisine persists. Put another
way, the way anthropologist Fredrik Barth would see it, the
“boundaries” of culinary Black America may alter (in this case,
foods or styles of preparation), but the site itself remains identifiable,
both by practitioners of that cuisine and others.48 Ethnographers
often depend on a reading of what we eat to understand
how we construct a self around the axes of food and other cultural
“stuff.”49 Soul food, that phrase long used by African Americans to
refer to their common cuisine, underscores the link between psychic
identity and eating. Food habits and tastes comprise some of
464 Rafia Zafar
the strongest factors of group identity. Their significance in creating
a bedrock, ethnic self has been acknowledged by anthropologists:
“[F]oodways seem particularly resistant to change. … It has
been suggested that this is because the earliest-formed layers of
culture, such as foodways, are the last to erode.””5 So if eating
“Black” functions as one of the primal determinants of an individual’s
life, we can see how the productions of the Dardens and
Smart-Grosvenor take up the task of re-creating that primal, gastronomic
entity as their group identity becomes ever more fragmented,
stratified, and diverse.
In the end, the simple act of eating cannot be separated from the
personal, the literary, or the social. Neither can you remove the
preference for, or preparation of, certain foods from a historical
context. When the Dardens describe the box lunches with which
they and other Black Americans traveled, their memories demand
we acknowledge the Jim Crow transportation and hotel industry,
which barred African Americans from public-eating places and
restricted their movement on common carriers (pp. 245-46).
Smart-Grosvenor writes a different kind of culinary history when,
fired up by white author William Styron’s rewriting of the life of
noted slave insurrectionist Nat Turner, she finds evidence that
“Nat’s last meal [was] roast pork and apple brandy” and creates a
new recipe, “Nat Turner Apple Pork Thing” (pp. 182-83). Thus, the
Dardens’ book works like an encyclopedia of recipes with history,
while Smart-Grosvenor’s autobiography with recipes regards
modem Black cookery as an agent of change. One cannot say that
the Dardens enshrine their heritage never to partake of it. Yet because
Smart-Grosvenor writes almost exclusively of her own life
and the place food and cooking hold within it, while the Dardens
record the manner in which their mother, father, and older relatives
ate, these two “Black” cookbooks differ remarkably. The three
see their roles, if not their dishes, dissimilarly, approaching from
complementary angles the “stuff” of African American culture:
their gastronomic lieux des memoires are in turn personal and communal,
individual and historical. Each book places African American
cuisine in a political context, records a social history that
must not be forgotten, and relates the lived experience of the
writer and/or her family.5′ Much more than grits and greens, the
signifying dishes of the Dardens and Smart-Grosvenor provide us
with a taste of where we’ve been, who we are, and where we
should be going.
Rafia Zafar 465
NOTES
I would like to thank all who have provided me with encouragement and critical feedback:
the editors and readers of GRAAT (of University of Tours, France), especially my
friend and colleague Claudine Raynaud, as an earlier version of this article appeared in
GRAAT 14 (1996); the Culinary Historian Societies of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Cambridge,
Massachusetts; John Egerton; the Program in American Studies at the University
of Texas, Austin; the editors and anonymous readers for Feminist Studies; and Doris
Witt.
1. John Egerton, Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History (1987; reprint, Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 16.
2. As one historian has written, “the spread of southern cooking to the North in our
own day, like the spread of so much else in southern culture, has represented, above all,
the triumph of its black component.” See Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The
World the Slaves Made (1974; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1976), 543.
3. The popular Charleston [South Carolina] Junior League’s Charleston Receipts
(Charleston: Junior League of Charleston, 1950), a community cookbook organized by a
white women’s volunteer organization, has perpetuated these stereotypes for five
decades. A “Southern” cookbook, Charleston Receipts depends for its renowned gentility
on the recipes, ingredients, and labor culled from the Blacks who labored in white
kitchens. Cuisine elements deemed simple when offered elsewhere by African American
practitioners here become classic when presented by white upper-middle-class employers.
Sometimes thanked directly and sometimes not, the Black cooks are demeaned
via quaint illustrations and even more quaint dialect; they become, in Patricia Yaeger’s
words, “edible labor.” See her “Edible Labor,” Southern Quarterly 30 (winter-spring 1992):
150-59, especially her remarks on the effaced Black cook/server (156). I have made an
analogous observation elsewhere of how the politically vanquished become the rhetorically
cannibalized. See Rafia Zafar, “The Proof of the Pudding: Of Haggis, Hasty Pudding,
and Transatlantic Influence,” Early American Literature 31 (1996): 133-49.
4. Patricia Turner, Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence
on Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 43.
5. Much of culinary tradition and method is handed down orally, whatever the society.
That cookery is “embodied knowledge” in Lisa M. Heldke’s words, whether practiced
by white or Black women, accounts for its denigrated status in a society that privileges
pure reason; see Lisa M. Heldke, “Foodmaking as a Thoughtful Practice,” in Cooking,
Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food, ed. Deane W. Curtin and Lisa M.
Heldke (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 203-29, esp. 218-20. The doubly
low status of the Black woman predicts their nearly subterranean level in U.S. society,
and by way of a corollary, the belief in their gastronomic labors as unworthy of notice.
6. In addition to the Darden sisters and Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, Prettyman’s essay
discusses Black women chefs Edna Lewis and Cleora Butler; we arrive at some of the
same conclusions. See Quandra Prettyman, “Come Eat at My Table: Lives with Recipes,”
in Southern Quarterly 30 (winter-spring 1992): 131-40.
7. As Doris Witt has remarked, “The cookbook is a privileged textual site among blacks
because of their overdetermined over representation in American kitchens, both public
and private”; she also discusses the mammy figure with particular reference to turn-ofthe-century
American culture. See “In Search of Our Mothers’ Cookbooks: Gathering
African-American Culinary Traditions” [indexed as Doris Smith], Iris: A Journal about
Women 26 (fall/ winter 1991): 22-27.
8. Genevieve Fabre and Robert O’Meally, History and Memory in African-American Culture
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 7. In their introduction, Fabre and
466 Rafia Zafar
O’Meally extend and apply French historian Pierre Nora’s term lieu de memoire to
African American culture.
9. Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, Vibration Cooking, or, the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl
(1970; reprint, New York: Ballantine Books, 1986, 1991); subsequent references (all to the
1991 edition) appear in parentheses in the text, unless otherwise noted. Carole and
Norma Jean Darden’s Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine: Recipes and Reminiscences of a Family
(New York: Doubleday & Co., 1978) is also in paper, but I have used the original
hardcover. Subsequent citations to this edition appear in parentheses in the text. The
continued popularity of these two works can be attested to by their publication history:
Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine has been in print pretty much continuously since its first
publication; Vibration Cooking is now in its third edition. Much anecdotal evidence indicates
hardcover first editions of Vibration Cooking are often borrowed from, and never
returned to, their original owners.
10. [Abby Fisher] What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking (1881; reprint, with
notes by Karen Hess, Bedford, Mass.: Applewood Books, 1995), 72.
11. The National Council of Negro Women, Historical Cookbook of the American Negro
(Washington, D.C.: Corporate Press, 1958).
12. Emblematic of a kind of ripple effect, similar celebrations of one’s origins, as well as
one’s political activism, arose in other groups. In terms of cultural origins, the impetus
to celebrate one’s identity came to be known in the 1970s as the “ethnic revival”; along
with this rise in various Americans’ perceptions of themselves as “Italian” or “Greek”
came a corresponding interest in ethnic cookbooks and restaurants. (Ethnic cookbooks,
as such, appeared well before the 1970s.) In terms of a political affiliation expressed
through an alternative venue, cookbooks and/or food also became a way to express a
certain lifestyle and/or social change. One volume that provides examples of both impulses
is Ita Jones’s The Grubbag: An Underground Cookbook (New York: Vintage, 1971), a
cookbook that grew out of a column in the Liberation News Service; Jones refers to her
upbringing in Texas and her search for ethnic origins. For discussions of such politically
oriented endeavors, see Warren Belasco, Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took
on the Food Industry (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989, 1993); and Curtin and
Heldke.
13. Fewer than fifteen books were published by Black presses in the first part of the
1960s, while about 160 books by similar firms appeared between 1970 and 1974. Donald
Franklin Joyce’s research on the Black press demonstrates this sharp rise in the number
and output of Black-owned presses post-1960; he also discussed the exchanges and
competition between white- and Black-owned publishers. See his Gatekeepers of Black
Culture (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), esp. 78-79, and 147.
14. Ruth L. Gaskins, A Good Heart and a Light Hand: Ruth L. Gaskins’ Collection of Traditional
Negro Recipes (Annandale, Va.: Turnpike, 1968). Although Quandra Prettyman’s
essay and Howard Paige’s Aspects of Afro-American Cookery (Southfield, Mich.: Aspects
Publishing Co., 1987) each provide bibliographies in their publications, Doris Witt’s
Black Hunger: Food and the Politics of U.S. Identity (New York: Oxford University Press,
1999) provides the most complete bibliography to date on Black cookbooks (the bibliography
was compiled with the assistance of David Lupton).
15. See Anne E. Goldman “‘I Yam What I Yam’: Cooking. Culture, and Colonialism” in
De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography, ed. Sidonie
Smith and Julia Watson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 169-95, esp.
171-73, which takes issue with Susan J. Leonardi’s invocation of a female-centered,
cross-class recipe exchange. See Leonardi’s “Recipes for Reading: Summer Pasta, Lobster
a la Riseholme, and Key Lime Pie,” PMLA 3 (May 1983): 340-47, for the origins of
this debate.
16. Despite the growing numbers of Black Americans in the professional and middle
classes, the percentage of Black poor remains too large for any American to feel compla-
Rafia Zafar 467
cent. That there has long been an identifiable “middle” or “upper” class in African America
is undeniable: see Jessica B. Harris’s “Heirloom Recipes from a Southern Family: A
Big-Flavored Meal in the African-American Tradition” (Food and Wine, February 1991)
for a gastronomic exegesis of this phenomenon.
17. Think, for example, of the “high-class” volumes of Julia Child, with their implication
that the cook will spend hours in the kitchen and frequently use expensive ingredients;
note again Smart-Grosvenor’s above-quoted remark on this implied distinction between
“white” and “Black” food-“white folks act like… there is some weird mystique [about
food]” (3).
18. Exceptions could be found in the collectively authored community or “charity”
cookbooks, volumes compiled by a group of women whose initial motives were often
financial (to rebuild a church, to raise funds for relief organizations) but whose final
product could speak to both individual desires for recognition and an acknowledgment
of woman’s worth. See Marion Bishop, “Speaking Sisters: Relief Society Cookbooks and
Mormon Culture,” in Recipes for Reading: History, Stories, Community Cookbooks, ed. Anne
L. Bower (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 89-104. In the same volume,
Ann Romines’s essay, “Growing Up with the Methodist Cookbooks” (75-88), attests
that such community cookbooks were the most-used texts her family owned. Bower’s
fine anthology collects a number of essays on community cookbooks-as autobiographies,
as cultural histories, as women’s alternative media.
19. Anne E. Goldman, Take My Word: Autobiographical Innovations of Ethnic American
Working Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 42.
20. Anne E. Goldman also finds the irreverence and sass of Smart-Grosvenor similar to
Hurston’s; see Take My Word, 47-49.
21. Black Hunger discusses the evolution of Smart-Grosvenor’s volume over its three
editions and two-plus decades.
22. In a well-known moment of gastronomic essentialism, the fictional Chloe of Uncle
Tom’s Cabin exclaims: “look at my great black stumpin hands. Now, don’t ye think dat
de Lord must have meant me to make de pie-crust, and you [Mrs. Shelby, the slave’s
“mistress”] to stay in the parlor?” (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin [1852;
reprint, New York: Harper Classics, 1965], 27).
23. Doris Witt’s “‘My Kitchen Was the World’: Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor’s Geechee
Diaspora,” in Black Hunger, refers to other works by Smart-Grosvenor, notably “The
Kitchen Crisis” and Thursdays and Every Other Sunday Off. A Domestic Rap (Garden City,
N.J.: Doubleday, 1972) that are specifically concerned with the status of domestic servants.
24. An expatriate social set and culinary doings are the well-known subjects of Alice B.
Toklas’s The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (1954; reprint, New York: Harper Perennial, 1984).
25. Toklas may have had more entree into French society than Smart-Grosvenor by
virtue of being white, but the African American counts wealthy people among her set as
well. On the other hand, Smart-Grosvenor was not, early on, immune from heterosexism.
In the preface to the second edition (1986) she decides not to excise a homophobic
remark; in the most recent printing (1991), the offensive sentence-“I wouldn’t pay no
faggot six hundred dollars to dress me up like a fool” (page 152 in the 1986 edition)-is
expunged.
26. So sure is Smart-Grosvenor of her value as an author and person, rather than as a
“mere” cook, that she includes an entire chapter of her correspondence, a move Robert
Stepto might refer to as self-authenticating.
27. For the Toklas recipes, see pp. 30 and 230 in The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. Those of us
who cook from the books we read will notice at least one divergence in philosophy, if
not in method, in the two works. Although Toklas and Smart-Grosvenor share a respect
for their audience-cooks’ expertise and common sense, Smart-Grosvenor insists: “I never
measure or weigh anything. I cook by vibration. … The amount of salt and pepper you
468 Rafia Zafar
want to use is your own business” (p. 3).
28. In this, Smart-Grosvenor can be said to anticipate Alice Walker’s well-known claiming
of Black women foremothers, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose
(New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1984); see esp. 3-14.
29. Freda de Knight, A Date with a Dish: A Cook Book of American Negro Recipes (first published
in 1948; revised and reprinted as The Ebony Cookbook: A Date with a Dish [Chicago:
Johnson, 1962, 1973]). Thanks to Doris Witt for the dating. References to A Date with a
Dish and several other Black cookbooks are absent in the 1991 preface, although she
does refer to John Pinderhughes. Smart-Grosvenor may not have been aware of the existence
of Black cookbooks, in part due to the relative obscurity of many such works;
Witt and Lupton’s Black culinary bibliography (in Black Hunger) lists about forty Blackauthored
cookbooks before 1970; a good number were published by small presses or
brought out by the authors themselves.
30. Although it may not need saying, I’ll note it anyway: the positions I sketch out here,
between individual and community, between Smart-Grosvenor and the Dardens, are
not absolute; elements of each outlook are found in both texts. Perhaps it’s best to say
that each cookbook emphasizes a different authorial stance.
31. The term “thick description” is Clifford Geertz’s; for amplification, see “Thick Description:
Toward the Interpretative Theory of Culture” in Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation
of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3-30.
32. Susan Kalcik has explored the transmission of ethnic identity through food, as I will
return to shortly. Elizabeth and Paul Rozin have noted that flavor may function symbolically:
having ethnic “tastes” places an individual within a specific group; similarly,
foods with a particular taste identify themselves as belonging to a particular community.
See Elizabeth Rozin and Paul Rozin, “Some Surprisingly Unique Characteristics of
Human Food Preferences,” in Food in Perspective: Proceedings of the Third International
Conference on Ethnological Food Research, Cardiff, Wales, ed. Alexander Fenton and Trefor
Owen (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1981).
33. Irma McClaurin reminds me that the book was published in 1978 and so before the
current suburbanization of the Black middle class. That Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine
remains in print, and has even been transformed into a play in the 1990s, may speak to
its continuing, reinvented appeal as a nostalgia item for the contemporary Black bourgeoisie.
34. The food pages of Essence attest to the bind between the need for quick, easy meals
and the desire for “heritage” recipes; thanks again to Irma McClaurin, for reminding me
of the continuing, if changing, significance of Sunday dinner.
35. Chitlins, or chitterlings, are pig intestines; they “are testament to the down-home
doctrine that nothing in the hog is inedible.” See Rick Bragg, “Atlanta Journal: A Delicacy
of the Past Is a Winner at Drive-Ins,” New York Times, 10 Nov. 1996, Final edition, sec.
1, p. 20.
36. See Lena Williams, “Preparing Soul Food Can Now Be as Easy as Opening a Can,”
New York Times, 26 May 1993, C3.
37. Quoted in Bragg, 20. Latter-day proscriptions against pork by Muslims and others
in Black America wishing to separate themselves from a slave past may also have effected
the turn away from pork products.
38. The avoidance of certain foods on the part of younger people speaks in part to a related
desire to distance themselves from hardship and social ostracism. See my remarks
on Pierre Bourdieu and his concept of the “foods of necessity,” n. 44.
39. “[In 1808] Congress finally prohibited the slave trade. Absalom Jones and other
black preachers began delivering annual thanksgiving sermons on New Year’s Day, the
date of the prohibition of trade and also the date of Haitian independence in 1804.” See
Gary B. Nash, from Forging Freedom, quoted in Ntozake Shange, If I Can Cook/You Know
God Can (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 6.
Rafia Zafar 469
40. Howard Paige, “African American Emancipation Day Celebrations,” informal talk,
August 1991, Greenfield Village Museum, Dearborn, Michigan.
41. Compare my observation with a similar one of Doris Witt’s, on the handling of
greens by the same cook: “Grosvenor manages to recreate the social context of recipe exchange,
yet she simultaneously refuses to give us anything but thoroughly imprecise
and unscientific suggestions on what to, and not to, do with greens. She offers a nuanced
analysis of the social forces which come into play in the economy of recipe exchange.”
See “In Search of Our Mothers’ Cookbooks,” 25.
42. Surprisingly, although intent on recapturing the exact tastes and smells of the past,
the Darden sisters show less resistance to modernization.
43. Harris, “Heirloom Recipes from a Southern family,” 50.
44. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard
Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 178. His discussion of “the paradoxes
of the taste of necessity” (177-79) has relevance beyond his original control group of
French women and men.
45. Jessica B. Harris, Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons: Africa’s Gifts to New World Cooking
(New York: Atheneum, 1989), 15, 11.
46. That the practice is fading I surmise from the few student hands raised in response
to my query “Do you know what pot likker is?” I, on the other hand, having lived with a
grandmother who was raised in part in a southern Black community, was frequently
admonished to drink my pot likker.
47. Cookbooks in the late 1990s regularly suggest smoked turkey wings as substitutes
for pork in various dishes; baked macaroni and cheese, a staple at Black American family
functions, can not be traced back to West Africa.
48. For a discussion of how ethnic groups persist as such and yet change in composition
and style, see Fredrik Barth, introduction to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social
Organization of Culture Difference (Boston: Little Brown, 1969), 9-30.
49. For example, Benedict Anderson, in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin
and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), notes that “communities are to be distinguished,
not by their falsity/ genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined”
(15). Although Anderson goes on to write of the ways groups construct themselves
around print media, one can extrapolate his ideas to the manner in which a Black
cultural identity is re-created, or created, through cookbooks.
50. Susan Kalcik discusses this phenomenon in her essay, “Ethnic Foodways in America:
Symbol and the Performance of Identity,” in Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United
States: The Performance of Group Identity, ed. Linda Keller Brown and Kay Mussell
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 37-65, esp. 39.
51. The writings of Jessica B. Harris, John Pinderhughes’s Family of the Spirit Cookbook:
Recipes and Remembrances from African-American Kitchens (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1990), Cleora Butler’s Cleora’s Kitchens and Eight Decades of Great American Food: The
Memoir of a Cook (Tulsa: Council Oak Books, 1985), and other, more recent books all display
similar literary/historical/culinary instincts. Although each presents food and its
role in the author’s life differently, all cooks choose to collect, compile, and record
recipes taken from family, travels, friends, or an individual career as chef and caterer.
All take care to explain why one might want to conflate a cookbook with a historical or
personal narrative.
