Class, identity, and anxiety at the plantation table: British travellers and antebellum Southern foodways

Abstract

For British travellers who ventured into Southern cities and onto Southern estates in the several decades leading up to the American Civil War, the complex interplay of Southern–British cultural affinities and differences defied the easy classification of their experience as ‘American’. For the visiting Briton, the experience of the South demanded an experience of the brutal economic system which drove it, and yet in Southern culture the guest often found herself very much at home. British travellers’ experiences of the region's unique culinary practices, in particular, fed into a fledgling imaginative construction of Southern regional identity in terms of nobility, material abundance and good living which was, however, problematised by anxieties surrounding the material basis of Southern food production: the ruthless exploitation of slave labour. The Southern table constituted a site where cognisance of this economic base of Southern agrarianism had to be repressed in order for the British traveller to come to terms with her sensual enjoyment of the proffered meal as well as to fulfil cultural expectations held regarding the graciousness and civility of the guest.