Cookbooks as documents of a racist history

I'm fascinated by old cookbooks for a number of reasons. Of course, my main obsession is just how terrible so many of the recipes sound to me, but I am also fascinated by what old cookbooks can show us about their time, their place, and the culture from which they came. This seemed like a good time to remind everyone how cookbooks document the United States' long history of racism.

I dug out the book that impressed itself in my mind as the most openly racist in my collection, Coastal Carolina Cooking (the Women's Auxiliary to the Ocean View Memorial Hospital, Myrtle Beach, 1958, though mine is a 1963 printing). Even though I've already highlighted the book's open racism, there were still more images to post.

Of course, the book offers "plantation" recipes.

If you're not clear about why this is an issue, there's a good article on Vice, or if you prefer a podcast, The Sporkful offers an episode.

You'll note that the recipes also offer caricatures of Black servants because of course they would. 

There's also nostalgia for the confederate past....

And we'll top it all off with a the stereotypical mammy cooking for a little white boy.

Though things have clearly changed since these cookbooks were written, they still haven't changed enough. (Even the tiny battles, like asking white people not to thoughtlessly use plantation in recipe titles, are still being fought. No wonder the big, important battles are still raging.) Cookbooks are a small and seemingly inconsequential reminder of our long history of racism, but they help document the ways white society has telegraphed that Black lives and Black experiences do not matter. The far too small social changes we've seen since this book's publication came about because of strife and protest. It's unfortunate that this kind of effort is still needed, but it's clearly still necessary.