African American Foodways

African American Foodways PDF Author: Anne Bower
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252076303
Category : African American cookery
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
Moving beyond catfish and collard greens to the soul of African American cooking

African American Foodways

African American Foodways PDF Author: Anne Bower
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252076303
Category : African American cookery
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
Moving beyond catfish and collard greens to the soul of African American cooking

The Cooking Gene

The Cooking Gene PDF Author: Michael W. Twitty
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062876570
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 504

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Book Description
2018 James Beard Foundation Book of the Year | 2018 James Beard Foundation Book Award Winner inWriting | Nominee for the 2018 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Nonfiction | #75 on The Root100 2018 A renowned culinary historian offers a fresh perspective on our most divisive cultural issue, race, in this illuminating memoir of Southern cuisine and food culture that traces his ancestry—both black and white—through food, from Africa to America and slavery to freedom. Southern food is integral to the American culinary tradition, yet the question of who "owns" it is one of the most provocative touch points in our ongoing struggles over race. In this unique memoir, culinary historian Michael W. Twitty takes readers to the white-hot center of this fight, tracing the roots of his own family and the charged politics surrounding the origins of soul food, barbecue, and all Southern cuisine. From the tobacco and rice farms of colonial times to plantation kitchens and backbreaking cotton fields, Twitty tells his family story through the foods that enabled his ancestors’ survival across three centuries. He sifts through stories, recipes, genetic tests, and historical documents, and travels from Civil War battlefields in Virginia to synagogues in Alabama to Black-owned organic farms in Georgia. As he takes us through his ancestral culinary history, Twitty suggests that healing may come from embracing the discomfort of the Southern past. Along the way, he reveals a truth that is more than skin deep—the power that food has to bring the kin of the enslaved and their former slaveholders to the table, where they can discover the real America together. Illustrations by Stephen Crotts

Recipes for Respect

Recipes for Respect PDF Author: Rafia Zafar
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820353655
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
Food studies, once trendy, has settled into the public arena. In the academy, scholarship on food and literary culture constitutes a growing river within literary and cultural studies, but writing on African American food and dining remains a tributary. Recipes for Respect bridges this gap, illuminating the role of foodways in African American culture as well as the contributions of Black cooks and chefs to what has been considered the mainstream. Beginning in the early nineteenth century and continuing nearly to the present day, African Americans have often been stereotyped as illiterate kitchen geniuses. Rafia Zafar addresses this error, highlighting the long history of accomplished African Americans within our culinary traditions, as well as the literary and entrepreneurial strategies for civil rights and respectability woven into the written records of dining, cooking, and serving. Whether revealed in cookbooks or fiction, memoirs or hotel-keeping manuals, agricultural extension bulletins or library collections, foodways knowledge sustained Black strategies for self-reliance and dignity, the preservation of historical memory, and civil rights and social mobility. If, to follow Mary Douglas’s dictum, food is a field of action—that is, a venue for social intimacy, exchange, or aggression—African American writing about foodways constitutes an underappreciated critique of the racialized social and intellectual spaces of the United States.

Soul Food

Soul Food PDF Author: Adrian Miller
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469607638
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
2014 James Beard Foundation Book Award, Reference and Scholarship Honor Book for Nonfiction, Black Caucus of the American Library Association In this insightful and eclectic history, Adrian Miller delves into the influences, ingredients, and innovations that make up the soul food tradition. Focusing each chapter on the culinary and social history of one dish--such as fried chicken, chitlins, yams, greens, and "red drinks--Miller uncovers how it got on the soul food plate and what it means for African American culture and identity. Miller argues that the story is more complex and surprising than commonly thought. Four centuries in the making, and fusing European, Native American, and West African cuisines, soul food--in all its fried, pork-infused, and sugary glory--is but one aspect of African American culinary heritage. Miller discusses how soul food has become incorporated into American culture and explores its connections to identity politics, bad health raps, and healthier alternatives. This refreshing look at one of America's most celebrated, mythologized, and maligned cuisines is enriched by spirited sidebars, photographs, and twenty-two recipes.

African American Food Culture

African American Food Culture PDF Author: William Frank Mitchell
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313346216
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
Like other Americans, African Americans partake of the general food offerings available in mainstream supermarket chains across the country. Food culture, however, may depend on where they live and their degree of connection to traditions passed down through generations since the time of slavery. Many African Americans celebrate a hybrid identity that incorporates African and New World foodways. The state of African American food culture today is illuminated in depth here for the first time, in the all-important context of understanding the West African origins of most African Americans of today. Like other Americans, African Americans partake of the general food offerings available in mainstream supermarket chains across the country. Food culture, however, may depend on where they live and their degree of connection to traditions passed down through generations since the time of slavery. Many African Americans celebrate a hybrid identity that incorporates African and New World foodways. The state of African American food culture today is illuminated in depth here for the first time, in the all-important context of understanding the West African origins of most African Americans of today. A historical overview discusses the beginnings of this hybrid food culture when Africans were forcibly removed from their homelands and brought to the United States. Chapter 2 on Major Foods and Ingredients details the particular favorites of what is considered classic African American food. In Chapter 3, Cooking, the African American family of today is shown to be like most other families with busy lives, preparing and eating quick meals during the week and more leisurely meals on the weekend. Special insight is also given on African American chefs. The Typical Meals chapter reflects a largely mainstream diet, with regional and traditional options. Chapter 6, Eating Out, highlights the increasing opportunities for African Americans to dine out, and the attractions of fast meals. The Special Occasions chapter discusses all the pertinent occasions for African Americans to prepare and eat symbolic dishes that reaffirm their identity and culture. Finally, the latest information in traditional African American diet and its health effects brings readers up to date in the Diet and Health chapter. Recipes, photos, chronology, resource guide, and selected bibliography round out the narrative.

Every Nation Has Its Dish

Every Nation Has Its Dish PDF Author: Jennifer Jensen Wallach
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146964522X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Jennifer Jensen Wallach's nuanced history of black foodways across the twentieth century challenges traditional narratives of "soul food" as a singular style of historical African American cuisine. Wallach investigates the experiences and diverse convictions of several generations of African American activists, ranging from Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois to Mary Church Terrell, Elijah Muhammad, and Dick Gregory. While differing widely in their approaches to diet and eating, they uniformly made the cultivation of "proper" food habits a significant dimension of their work and their conceptions of racial and national belonging. Tracing their quests for literal sustenance brings together the race, food, and intellectual histories of America. Directly linking black political activism to both material and philosophical practices around food, Wallach frames black identity as a bodily practice, something that conscientious eaters not only thought about but also did through rituals and performances of food preparation, consumption, and digestion. The process of choosing what and how to eat, Wallach argues, played a crucial role in the project of finding one's place as an individual, as an African American, and as a citizen.

What the Slaves Ate

What the Slaves Ate PDF Author: Herbert C. Covey
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
Carefully documenting African American slave foods, this book reveals that slaves actively developed their own foodways-their customs involving family and food. The authors connect African foods and food preparation to the development during slavery of Southern cuisines having African influences, including Cajun, Creole, and what later became known as soul food, drawing on the recollections of ex-slaves recorded by Works Progress Administration interviewers. Valuable for its fascinating look into the very core of slave life, this book makes a unique contribution to our knowledge of slave culture and of the complex power relations encoded in both owners' manipulation of food as a method of slave control and slaves' efforts to evade and undermine that control. While a number of scholars have discussed slaves and their foods, slave foodways remains a relatively unexplored topic. The authors' findings also augment existing knowledge about slave nutrition while documenting new information about slave diets.

Eating in the Side Room

Eating in the Side Room PDF Author: Mark S. Warner
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813072700
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
An archaeological study of African American foodways in nineteenth-century Annapolis In Eating in the Side Room, Mark Warner uses the archaeological data of food remains recovered from excavations in Annapolis, Maryland, and the Chesapeake to show how African Americans established identity in the face of pervasive racism and marginalization. By studying the meat purchasing habits of two African American families—the Maynards and the Burgesses—Warner skillfully demonstrates that while African Americans were actively participating in a growing mass consumer society, their food choices subtly yet unequivocally separated them from white society. The "side rooms" where the two families ate their meals not only satisfied their hunger but also their need to maintain autonomy from an oppressive culture. As a result, Warner claims, the independence that African Americans practiced during this time helped prepare their children and grandchildren to overcome persistent challenges of white oppression.  Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Koshersoul

Koshersoul PDF Author: Michael W. Twitty
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062891723
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 462

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Book Description
“Twitty makes the case that Blackness and Judaism coexist in beautiful harmony, and this is manifested in the foods and traditions from both cultures that Black Jews incorporate into their daily lives…Twitty wishes to start a conversation where people celebrate their differences and embrace commonalities. By drawing on personal narratives, his own and others’, and exploring different cultures, Twitty’s book offers important insight into the journeys of Black Jews.”—Library Journal “A fascinating, cross-cultural smorgasbord grounded in the deep emotional role food plays in two influential American communities.”—Booklist The James Beard award-winning author of the acclaimed The Cooking Gene explores the cultural crossroads of Jewish and African diaspora cuisine and issues of memory, identity, and food. In Koshersoul, Michael W. Twitty considers the marriage of two of the most distinctive culinary cultures in the world today: the foods and traditions of the African Atlantic and the global Jewish diaspora. To Twitty, the creation of African-Jewish cooking is a conversation of migrations and a dialogue of diasporas offering a rich background for inventive recipes and the people who create them. The question that most intrigues him is not just who makes the food, but how the food makes the people. Jews of Color are not outliers, Twitty contends, but significant and meaningful cultural creators in both Black and Jewish civilizations. Koshersoul also explores how food has shaped the journeys of numerous cooks, including Twitty’s own passage to and within Judaism. As intimate, thought-provoking, and profound as The Cooking Gene, this remarkable book teases the senses as it offers sustenance for the soul. Koshersoul includes 48-50 recipes.

Eating While Black

Eating While Black PDF Author: Psyche A. Williams-Forson
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469668467
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Psyche A. Williams-Forson is one of our leading thinkers about food in America. In Eating While Black, she offers her knowledge and experience to illuminate how anti-Black racism operates in the practice and culture of eating. She shows how mass media, nutrition science, economics, and public policy drive entrenched opinions among both Black and non-Black Americans about what is healthful and right to eat. Distorted views of how and what Black people eat are pervasive, bolstering the belief that they must be corrected and regulated. What is at stake is nothing less than whether Americans can learn to embrace nonracist understandings and practices in relation to food. Sustainable culture—what keeps a community alive and thriving—is essential to Black peoples' fight for access and equity, and food is central to this fight. Starkly exposing the rampant shaming and policing around how Black people eat, Williams-Forson contemplates food's role in cultural transmission, belonging, homemaking, and survival. Black people's relationships to food have historically been connected to extreme forms of control and scarcity—as well as to stunning creativity and ingenuity. In advancing dialogue about eating and race, this book urges us to think and talk about food in new ways in order to improve American society on both personal and structural levels.