Recipes in Context

Abstract

This paper makes novel use of digital archives and the history of publishing to reveal the previously unknown author of the first cookbook published by a woman in the Carolinas. The traditional tools of the culinary historian, including textual analysis and biographical research, proved insufficient to identify the author of The Carolina Receipt Book (1832). The researchers therefore situated the cookbook within the social and intellectual milieu of antebellum Charleston—not only the traditional female networks of domestic literature and charitable works, but also the masculine politics of Nullification, slavery and states' rights, which led ultimately to the Civil War. The paper analyzes how an elite Southern family sought to erase the historical memory of the volume in order to assure cultural predominance for its own female members.