American Cooking Research Articles

Cooking and feminism through Argentine literature

This essay analyzes women’s connections with cooking through the work of three female writers from Argentina. I uncover key moments in the history of the country in which culinary practices represent a channel for larger reflections on gender struggles and women’s rights. I distinguish three representative cases within the complex and rich relationship between women, cooking, and feminism in Argentine literature: the incursion of nineteenth-century writers in recipe books; the feminists of the 1980s and their use of the culinary language as a political and erotic expression; and cooking and food as an exploration of new social and sexual orders in contemporary literature. Within each period, I focus on a particular writer and literary work: Juana Manuela Gorriti’s Cocina ecléctica (1890), Tununa Mercado’s short story “Antieros” (1988), and Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s Las aventuras de la China Iron (2017). These Argentine authors provide their knowledge on the diverse cultural roots and habits in South American cooking and give predominance to senses and desire over rational prescriptions on women’s bodies, among other narrative strategies. Thus, analyzed as a corpus, these authors give us a broader idea of feminist practices through cooking and, ultimately, expand multiple meanings of feminism itself from a local perspective.

Craft or Curse? How Barbecue Became Cool

Craft or Curse?How Barbecue Became Cool Adrian Miller (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Scott's Bar-B-Que, Hemingway, South Carolina, June 20–21, 2012. All photographs from Southern Foodways Alliance, by Denny Culbert unless otherwise noted. i recently visited Dublin, Ireland, and there were several restaurants serving Central Texas–style barbecue. Whether or not they were doing it well is another matter, but the point is that people around the world can't seem to get enough of the cuisine. Barbecue is an ancient and now global method of food preparation whose history has been deeply shaped by place, people, and economies of labor—particularly in the American South. And it's this style of southern barbecue that is particularly hot right now. American barbecue competitions and restaurants are proliferating in the United States and worldwide. Its cooks and writers are famous. But what's making barbecue so trendy? [End Page 102] ________ the seeds for barbecue's current fever pitch were planted in the 1990s when food media types started reframing barbecuing as a craft. Before that time, barbecue was certainly appreciated, but it held on to its working-class roots. With the media reframing, barbecue suddenly became something "cool." Young white men, who might have likely pursued other creative or white-collar professional careers, plunged into the world of barbecue as a vocation or as a side hustle. We've lived with the blatant and subtle consequences of that shift ever since. One unfortunate consequence is that the barbecue boom and boon has been good to white people, especially white men, but not so much to the African American chefs long considered the cuisine's "go-to" cooks. Language played an important role in barbecue's redefinition. We've seen barbecue cooks called many things, and "pitmaster" is the favored title these days. Texas Monthly barbecue editor Daniel Vaughn's deft examination of what we should call the barbecue greats found that the term gained currency in the late 1970s and the 1980s. In its most favorable light, the word pitmaster implies expertise, craftsmanship, and mastery. Unfortunately, the term has become so overused that it no longer holds special meaning. As food writer R. L. Reeves aptly noted in Vaughn's article, "If you can butt a Bic lighter up against a Kingsford briquette these days, you've earned the sobriquet 'pitmaster.'" Still, the wide application of the term facilitated the reframing of barbecuing as a craft, which begs the question: what do we mean by "craft," and should it apply to making barbecue?1 In 1990, Janet Kardon, director of the American Craft Museum, defined craft as objects "created by trained professionals or individuals who are carrying on traditions transmitted from their elders. The artist is aware of the historical continuum of craft, either within the ethnic or national community or from the larger mainstream, and [the artist] is often committed to extending and expanding that continuum in inventive ways." Though Kardon wrote in terms better suited for a material object, the definition works well for food and how some barbecue cooks are currently perceived.2 If craft represents the professionalized production of material, then the work of supposedly "untrained" people falls into a catchall category called "folk art." Folk artists aren't valued by mainstream society to the same extent as craftspeople. Folk artists tend to remain anonymous to, and underappreciated by, the larger public. [End Page 103] When African American cooks dominated barbecue until the late twentieth century, it was highly appreciated if menial work. Barbecuing had the trappings of craft, but these cooks clearly fell into a raced category of skilled workers. Barbecue-as-craft, however, opened up a new space that white people could enter and dominate. Though writing about barbers, butchers, and bartenders, Richard E. Ocejo, a leading scholar on contemporary craft culture, adeptly describes the convergence of several factors that allowed this aspect of barbecue craft culture to explode. In an online interview, Ocejo opines on this new generation of craftspeople: Primarily, they pursue the elite versions of these jobs because they allow them to use their heads, hands, and social skills. Like much knowledge-based...

Broadening the Story

Broadening the Story

Editor’s Introduction

Editor’s Introduction

How was the cooking skills and healthy eating evaluation questionnaire culturally adapted to Brazil?

Abstract The study described the cross-cultural adaptation process of the American Cooking Skills and Healthy Eating questionnaire to Brazil. Six stages were followed: Translation; Synthesis of translations; Back-translations; Expert Committee; Synthesis of final version; and the Pretest (self-administered online questionnaire in a Brazilian University). Participants responded to the translated questionnaire twice for test-retest. Conceptual, item, semantic, operational and measurement equivalences were evaluated between original and translated questionnaires, as well as the internal consistency and test-retest reliability. Item, conceptual, semantic equivalences between original and Brazilian questionnaires were reached before the Expert Committee stage. Specific cooking techniques and terms were adapted. Forty-eight students answered the questionnaire in the pre-test stage, achieving the operational and measurement equivalences with kappa’s agreement from moderate to substantial, and satisfactory to excellent correlations between measures. Only two measures showed low internal consistency. The combination of stages and equivalences approaches used in this cross cultural adaptation study provided lessons for further Nutrition’s researches, disclosing the complexity of cooking skills concepts.

Sharon Hudgins (with recipes by Sharon and Tom Hudgins): <i>T-Bone</i> <i>Whacks and Caviar Snacks: Cooking with Two Texans in Siberia and the Russian Far East</i> (Great American Cooking Series, book 5)

Sharon Hudgins (with recipes by Sharon and Tom Hudgins): T-Bone Whacks and Caviar Snacks: Cooking with Two Texans in Siberia and the Russian Far East (Great American Cooking Series, book 5): University of North Texas Press, 2018: 448 pp., hardback, £41.50.

Roblyn Rawlins and David Livert: <i>Making Dinner: How American cooks produce and make meaning out of the evening meal</i>

Roblyn Rawlins and David Livert: Making Dinner: How American cooks produce and make meaning out of the evening meal: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019: 218 pp., hardback, £85.00.

Women’s language in female celebrity chef cookbooks

ABSTRACTThis article explores the gendered language used in female celebrity chef cookbooks. The analysis is a case study of three female celebrity chefs from the American cooking channel Food Network: Ree Drummond, Ina Garten, and Giada De Laurentiis. Relying on an interdisciplinary approach of interactional sociolinguistics, sociology, and feminism, this study identifies how the use of seemingly weak women’s language is used to enhance the celebrity chef’s appeal. Discourses of expertise, politeness strategies, and confessions build trust and rapport between the celebrity chef and the audience. This study complicates previous studies on gendered language and argues that women’s language strengthens the power and authority of female celebrity chefs as influential models of womanhood.

To Live and Dine in Dixie: The Evolution of Urban Food Culture in the Jim Crow South

Angela Jill Cooley's compelling history argues that public eateries were a flashpoint in the urban Jim Crow South because they endangered the region's racial hierarchy. By attending to de facto and de jure segregation as a “careful performance of race-specific roles” designed to support white supremacy and by amply demonstrating food culture as its main stage, Cooley richly complicates understanding of the evolving New South city (p. 108). Structured in three parts, each consisting of one chapter on changes in food culture and one on associated changes in law and society, this history spans nearly one century from the end of Reconstruction to the aftermath of the civil rights movement. Cooley explicates how the South's urbanization increased participation in national consumerism and democratized dining out. These transformations, Cooley maintains, spurred implementation of race-based segregation laws in public eateries. Positioning the white southern home as integral to inculcation into white supremacy, chapter 1 elaborates the study's theoretical framework that the intimacy of eating implicated racial purity. Cooley examines how middle-class women used early twentieth-century initiatives to modernize home kitchens to serve whiteness by distinguishing white cooking and consumption as scientific and pure against African American cooking and consumption practices, denigrated as primitive and impure. Yet the drive to perpetuate antebellum conceptualizations of African Americans as a natural servant class overrode white anxieties about blacks' supposed polluting presence. The book proceeds by documenting the realization of this ideological contradiction in white restaurant proprietors' concomitant employment of African Americans in servile positions and strict enforcement of racial segregation.

“The Greatest Thrill I Get is When I Hear a Criminal Say, ‘Yes, I Did it’”: Race and the Third Degree in New Orleans, 1920–1945

On May 11, 1938, two New Orleans policemen entered the Astoria Restaurant, marched to the kitchen, and approached Loyd D. T. Washington, a 41-year-old African American cook. They informed Washington that they would be taking him to the First Precinct station for questioning, although they assured the cook that he need not change his clothes and “should be right back” to the “Negro restaurant,” where he had worked for 3 years. Immediately after arriving at the station house, police officers “surrounded” Washington, showed him a photograph of a man, and announced that he had killed a white man in Yazoo City, Mississippi, 20 years earlier. When Washington insisted that he did not know the man in the photograph, that he had never been to (or even heard of) Yazoo City, and that he had been in the army at the time of the murder, the law enforcers confined him in a cell, although they had no warrant for his arrest and did not charge him with any crime. The following day, a detective brought him to the “show-up room” in the precinct house, where he continued the interrogation and, according to Washington, “tried to make me sign papers stating that I had killed a white man” in Mississippi. As every African American New Orleanian knew, the show-up (or line-up) room was the setting where detectives tortured suspects and extracted confessions. “You know you killed him, Nigger,” the detective roared. Washington, however, refused to confess, and the detective began punching him in the face, knocking out five of his teeth. After Washington crumbled to the floor, the detective repeatedly kicked him and broke one of his ribs. The beating continued for an hour, until other policemen restrained the detective, saying “give him a chance to confess and if he doesn't you may start again.” But Washington did not confess, and the violent interrogation began anew. A short time later, another police officer interrupted the detective, telling him “do not kill this man in here, after all he is wanted in Yazoo City.” Bloodied and writhing in pain, Washington asked to contact his family, but the request was ignored. Because he had not been formally charged with a crime, New Orleans law enforcers believed that Washington had no constitutional protection again self-incrimination or coercive interrogation and no right to an arraignment or bail, and they had no obligation to contact his relatives or to provide medical care for him.

To Live and Dine in Dixie: The Evolution of Urban Food Culture in the Jim Crow South by Angela Jill Cooley

To Live and Dine in Dixie: The Evolution of Urban Food Culture in the Jim Crow South. By Angela Jill Cooley. Southern Foodways Alliance Studies in Culture, People, and Place. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, 2015. Pp. xii, 207. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4759-2; cloth, $69.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4758-5.) In this fascinating look at the social and legal effects of changing foodways in the twentieth-century South, Angela Jill Cooley argues that white southerners prioritized racial and gender control as they adapted first a new urban culture and then a mass consumer economy. In the Progressive era, white housekeepers marginalized African American cooks by promoting euthenics--a pseudoscience created by home economics founder Ellen H. Richards oriented toward improving the white race through imposing certain household standards (p. 30). After World War II, white southern proprietors turned the language of personal rights and what Cooley terms the myth of private space justify segregated public eating spaces (p. 136). Throughout the book, Cooley charts how white southerners benefited from the trends that made food more democratic--economic growth and nationalizing food practices--while claiming that the democratic legal shift associated with civil rights legislation was too intrusive. Such astute analysis characterizes this book, making it essential reading for historians of segregation in the South. While using a well-established periodization Cooley offers some significant new insights. In the first part of the twentieth century southern white women, influenced by the rise of domestic science and growing racial problems, attempted connect proper food preparation white supremacy. In public eating spaces, as lunch counters and other types of public eateries proliferated, policy makers feared that white women and black men might interact in locations beyond elite control. Cooley's careful research here indicates that racial segregation was part of a long-standing effort impose order that initially focused on deviations by class and gender. For example, the Atlanta city council sought keep restaurateurs from offering free food with alcohol sales, assuming the practice encouraged post-dinner interactions among men and women. But there and elsewhere, immigrant proprietors occasionally flouted the custom of maintaining dining rooms for elite white women, and further transgressed by employing white women as waitresses, who might then serve black men. By 1914 cities across the South began banning interracial eating, fearing that it contributed to racial mixing and thereby challenge[d] racial purity (p. 65). Between 1936 and 1959 federal food regulations, public education, and economic expansion brought food sciences into the mainstream and made public eating much more widespread. …

Gettin’ Down Home With the Neelys: gastro-porn and televisual performances of gender, race, and sexuality

This article illuminates how performances of gender, race, and sexuality are integrated with representations of food and food performance in contemporary American cooking television. Interrogating the intersections of food, gender, race, sexuality, and performance, this essay explores how the cable-television show, Down Home with the Neelys, depicts a nouveau gastro-porn anchored in the perceived pornographic level of blackness itself. The author reveals the ways that food and performances of food become a medium of gendering and racialization employed by American popular media. Through the lens of reality television, shows like Down Home (re)produce a certain type of black heterosexuality and gendered enactments of domesticity and space, while challenging dominant televisual reflections of black love and labor. The author argues that the Neelys self-consciously employ a vernacular aesthetic performative of “down home” (a uniquely classed, temporally–spatially situated, and sexualized blackness) to exploit the phenomenon of gastro-porn in a highly lucrative performance that signals the entangled artifice of gender, race, and sexuality. More than offering culinary expertise and education, such cooking instruction reveals the pedagogy of gender, race, and sexuality as visual lessons of a complex and contradictory authenticity. This essay reveals television cooking shows as critical sites for considering the domestic laboring of gendered and racialized sexualities. In particular, shows like Down Home evince the ways that race continues to be rendered in visual terms and the enduring edibility of blackness.

Slush on the Mizzentops, Butter in the Hold: Food on American Clipper Ships

In the early years of the Gold Rush, the food carried by clipper ships sustained and shaped San Francisco. At first, clippers that could reach the city in less than a hundred days helped to save the burgeoning community of tents and shanties from hunger. Later, they Americanized its cuisine—and made fabulous profits—by carrying butter, hams, whiskey, and other Eastern staples to restaurants built in the holds of abandoned ships. The food served to sailors was often less exalted than that carried in the holds just below their feet, with simple dry biscuit and dry salted beef relieved only by the boiled puddings of flour and apples known as duff. The crews themselves were remarkably diverse, with Lascars and Scandinavians served dried peas and greasy “scouse” by African American or Chinese cooks who prepared meals in tiny, freestanding deckhouses. In later years, the clippers' influence on American food reversed itself, as they carried humble guano to rejuvenate depleted eastern agricultural land. But in their prime, the clippers were a unique confluence of necessity, engineering excellence, and beauty, as valued for the sight of their towering moonraker sails as for the food they carried.

Icons of American cooking

Icons of American cooking

Cooking in other women's kitchens: domestic workers in the South, 1865-1960

As African American women left the plantation economy behind, many entered domestic service in southern cities and towns. Cooking was one of the primary jobs they performed, feeding generations of white families and, in the process, profoundly shaping southern foodways and culture. Rebecca Sharpless argues that, in the face of discrimination, long workdays, and low wages, African American cooks worked to assert measures of control over their own lives. As employment opportunities expanded in the twentieth century, most African American women chose to leave cooking for more lucrative and less oppressive manufacturing, clerical, or professional positions. Through letters, autobiography, and oral history, Sharpless evokes African American women's voices from slavery to the open economy, examining their lives at work and at home.

The ‘servantless American cook’

Clarifcation of StockIf you wish to serve a rich homemade consommé, jellied soup, or aspic, you should clarify your stock so it is beautifully clear and sparkling. This is accomplished by beating egg whites into the cold stock, then heating it to just below simmer for 15 minutes. The egg-white globules dispersed into the stock act as a magnet for all its minute cloudy particles. They gradually rise to the surface, leaving a crystal-clear liquid below them.Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck Mastering the Art of French Cooking 19611Bile Salt MediaBile salt agar is made by dissolving 2% of agar in the stock fuid either in the steamer or in the autoclave. The mixture is cleared with the white of a whole egg, fltered, neutral red added in the same proportion as for broth, and distributed into fasks in quantities of 80 c.c, which is enough to make three plates of the usual size. When required for use the fermentable substance is added to the agar in the fask and the whole placed in a water bath or steamer. When melted the agar is poured into Petri dishes, allowed to solidify, and then dried in an incubator or warm room, the plate being placed upside down with the bottom detached and propped up on the edge of the cover.Alfred T MacConkey “Bile Salt Media and their Advantages in some Bacteriological Examinations”Journal of Hygiene 19092

Establishing heme iron values for the Canadian Nutrient File (CNF)

ObjectivesHeme iron, primarily from the hemoglobin and myoglobin of meat, poultry and fish (MFP) is better absorbed than non‐heme iron. Monsen et al. (1978) assumed that the proportion of heme iron contained in various meats averages 40%, while the remaining 60% is found in the less bioavailable non‐heme form. More recent evidence suggests that this ratio may vary depending on the type and cut of MFP. Currently, the CNF lists only total iron values. The objective of our research was to match heme iron values from the literature to foods within the CNF.MethodsAn extensive literature search was conducted to identify the heme content of different souces of MFP. Values from the literature were then matched to CNF foods with consideration of cuts and similarities to North American cooking methods. In order to match heme values from the literature to MFP foods, average values were often generated across cuts and cooking methods eg. ground chicken was an average of white and dark meat.Results and DiscussionA broad range of heme values were observed across MFP types. The following heme values were attributed: 33–70% for beef cuts, 21–40% for fish, 27–66% for pork cuts, 26–37% for poultry, and 40–63% for veal. When no literature value for heme iron was found eg., game meats, and many types of fish, a value of 40% was used as a default. The heme content of beef, veal and some pork cuts are higher than 40%, while poultry and fish might have lower heme iron contents.ConclusionIncorporating heme iron values into the CNF that are reflective of various MFP provides useful data for assessing iron bioavailability from foods/diets and for developing future nutritional policies targeted at reducing iron deficiency.

Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America. By Frederick Douglass Opie. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. xviii, 238 pp. $24.95, ISBN 978-0-231-14638-8.)

Is soul food the American expression of the mixing of diverse African foodways from across the Atlantic world? Is it a gift from rural folk culture, black and white? Is it what happened when African American cooks interacted with other cultures? Is it a memory of southern roots tasted on the end of a fork? Is it a dish that becomes more than the sum of its parts when inexpensive ingredients combine with wisdom and spirit? Is it the invention of the 1960s and 1970s black power movement, naming what had previously been just dinner? Is soul food a little different to each person who describes it? Frederick Douglass Opie argues that the answer to all those questions is yes. In Hog and Hominy, he traces a careful history of soul food, untangling the multiple roots, challenging some cherished mythologies, and ultimately bringing a helpfully complicated world perspective to an often individualized term.

Kitchen literacy: how we lost knowledge of where food comes from and why we need to get it back

Ask children where food comes from, and they'll probably answer: supermarket. Ask most adults, and their replies may not be much different. Where our foods are raised and what happens to them between farm and supermarket shelf have become mysteries. How did we become so disconnected from the sources of our breads, beef, cheeses, cereal, apples, and countless other foods that nourish us every day?Ann Vileisis' answer is a sensory-rich journey through the history of making dinner. Kitchen Literacy takes us from an eighteenth-century garden to today's sleek supermarket aisles, and eventually to farmer's markets that are now enjoying a resurgence. Vileisis chronicles profound changes in how American cooks have considered their foods over two centuries and delivers a powerful statement: what we don't know could hurt us.As the distance between farm and table grew, we went from knowing particular places and specific stories behind our foods' origins to instead relying on advertisers' claims. The woman who raised, plucked, and cooked her own chicken, knew its entire life history while today most of us have no idea whether hormones were fed to our poultry. Industrialized eating is undeniably convenient, but it has also created health and environmental problems, including food-borne pathogens, toxic pesticides, and pollution from factory farms.Though the hidden costs of modern meals can be high, Vileisis shows that greater understanding can lead consumers to healthier and more sustainable choices. Revealing how knowledge of our food has been lost and how it might now be regained, Kitchen Literacy promises to make us think differently about what we eat.

Double Cheeseburgers, Quiche, and Vegetarian Burritos: American Cooking from the 1920s through Today (review)

Double Cheeseburgers, Quiche, and Vegetarian Burritos: American Cooking from the 1920s through Today (review)