Anne L. Bower, editor.African American Foodways: Explorations of History and Culture.:African American Foodways: Explorations of History and Culture.(The Food Series, number 7.)

Abstract

It has become commonplace to note that culinary history is achieving due academic recognition. The emergence of peer-reviewed journals and food-related book series speak to the field's ongoing incorporation into mainstream historical scholarship. Central to the process of attaining scholarly legitimacy has been the steady effort to place the “culinary” in the context of the “history”: that is, to interweave food into the past in ways that avoid the insularity that characterizes so many amateurish exemplars of the genre. These seven essays, edited by Anne L. Bower, offer a microcosm of the field's progression. In their wide-ranging quality and subject matter, they reveal evidence of culinary history's potential as a method of historical inquiry while, perhaps more notably, underscoring the serious flaws to which the discipline remains most vulnerable. The study of African American history has made heroic strides in the last twenty-five years and thus it makes perfect sense, as Bower correctly frames the matter, to study “the powerful ways food and food customs have shaped group and individual identities” (p. 8). Unfortunately, the first three essays in the volume—included under the rubric “The History of African American Food”—collectively fail to integrate African American food into the detailed tapestry that historians have woven over the past two decades. What follows in part one is a series of compelling culinary observations without the historical grounding to make them much more than anecdotal or, worse, celebratory expressions of African American food. The historical processes underlying identity and group formation are, in essence, absent.