The Signifying Dish: Autobiography and History in Two Black Women's Cookbooks

Abstract

These buffoonish characters were the fictive counterparts of legions of unknown culinary workers, African Americans whose legacy and labor shaped much of what we eat to this day.2 Yet these historical chefs continue to be overshadowed by the long-running specter of the mammy-cook.3 As folklorist Patricia Turner asks, in her analysis of the production and reproduction of “mammy” kitchen artifacts: “What price has been exacted from the real black women who have been forced to make their way in a culture that pays homage to a distorted icon?”4 This disjunction-between the spurious worship of an unlettered genius Black cook5 and that figure’s long absence within what I call the “kitchens of power”—leads to still another question, posed by Quandra Prettyman: If “Black cooks are familiar figures in our national mythology as well as in our national history. . . . [why is it] so few have produced cookbooks”?6 The beginnings of an answer lie in the difficulty of writing a book that engages simultaneously with the shadows of Black slavery, servitude, and oppression, the persistence of stereotypes, and the practicalities of cooking.7