Reconstituted Narratives

Abstract

Reconstituted Narratives Catherine R. Peters (bio) A Review of An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States by Lauren F. Klein. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2020. Pp. 232. $100 cloth, $25 paper. In An Archive of Taste, Lauren F. Klein carefully considers the meanings of taste elaborated by an elite group of white men who founded the United States alongside the enslaved Afro-diasporic individuals whose skill and knowledge made it possible. Examining archival materials, such as personal papers, published tracts, cookbooks, and autobiographical accounts, as well as poetry and painting that span the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Klein constellates a range of methods to understand how eating "came to matter" (2). While Klein's attention lingers upon some of the most well-known figures of the early republic, she simultaneously seeks to locate the enslaved Afro-diasporic tastemakers whose voices do not typically form part of the official historical archive. An Archive of Taste reads like a series of experiments toward thinking together philosophies of taste as well as eating and bodies, culminating in an especially lucid account regarding how computational methods demonstrate the centrality of enslaved labor to the making of the early United States. Klein's monograph confronts the predicament of studying a historical object, like food, that no longer exists. How did historical subjects living upon the eastern shores of the United States encounter and taste ingredients, recipes, and dishes? How did these experiences illuminate or exceed their [End Page 111] subject positions? To approach these and related questions, Klein employs close reading and historical analysis, in addition to what she calls "speculative methods for theorizing and even visualizing large amounts of text" (9). Her citations traverse established scholarship in the fields of nineteenth-century literary studies and food studies, including the idea that particular forms of taste informed early nationalism (which Klein glosses as republican taste). Additionally, the text embraces contemporary conversations, led especially by Black feminist scholars, that seek to name and confront the limits of the archive through what Klein terms "reconstituted narratives" (2, 10). Taste, Klein reveals, has a long lineage in Western philosophical traditions. As a term, it has been variously deployed to suggest encounter, experience, and evaluation. Sometimes, it has signaled an innate sensibility or, alternatively, a cultivation of the senses toward judgment. Furthermore, different theorists of taste have selectively deployed the term toward varying ends. For the white men who led the early republic, taste meant moral judgment, even as it more literally referred to rituals and decisions at their tables. Klein frames five chapters through categories that she both explores and challenges. Chapter 1, "Taste," introduces the four men whose respective taste conditioned the early republic: enslaved cook James Hemings and Thomas Jefferson; enslaved valet Paul Jennings and James Madison. Demonstrating the importance of enslaved tastemakers to republican taste, Klein asserts that Jefferson penned terms of emancipation in 1793 that required Hemings to train a "replacement cook" before he could be emancipated himself. Furthermore, Klein juxtaposes Jefferson's philosophical claims regarding the alleged intemperance of Afro-diasporic people with his reliance upon Hemings's precision in measurement at mealtimes (31). That the elite white men who developed racialized notions of restraint failed to abide by them contrasts significantly with enslaved men's household labor. For example, as Madison grew increasingly infirm, Jennings was tasked with cutting Madison's food into pieces small enough to eat, a situation highlighting that the actual regulation of everyday meals fell, not to white republican men, but rather upon enslaved Afro-diasporic individuals. Beyond consumption, associations between civic virtue and eating in the early republic extended to the production of food. In particular, Klein discusses Jefferson's and Madison's experimentation with agriculture, both as a model and metaphor for the cultivation of taste (35). These are important insights, but I also perceive [End Page 112] a missed opportunity to contend with the structures of settler colonialism embedded in agriculturally inflected writing, which, for example, allowed Jefferson and Madison to describe education as the engrafting of "a new man on the native stock" (37). Chapter 2, "Appetite," close reads three different writers' respective orientations toward taste through appetite. Following...