Updated: Reading List

Primary Texts:

  1. Smart-Grosvenor, Vertamae. Vibration Cooking: or, The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl. Athens, The University of Georgia Press, 2011.  
  2. Tipton-Martin, Toni. The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks. Austin, University of Texas Press, 2015. 
  3. Mukerjee Furstenau, Nina. Biting Through the Skin: An Indian Kitchen in America’s Heartland. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2013.  
  4. De Loup, Maximilliam. The American Salad Book. G. R. Knapp, 1899. 
  5. Witt, Doris. Black Hunger Soul Food and America. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2004.  
  6. Madavan, Vijay. Cooking the Indian Way. Minneapolis, Lerner Publishing Group, 2002.  
  7. Wood, Bertha M. Foods of the Foreign-Born In Relation to Health. Boston, Whitcomb & Barrows, 1922.  
  8. Long, Lucy M. Ethnic American Food Today. Maryland, Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, 2015.   

Secondary/Theoretical Works:

  1. Slocum, Rachel. “Race in the Study of Food.” Progress in Human Geography, vol. 35, no. 3, SAGE Publications, 2011, pp. 303–27, doi:10.1177/0309132510378335.
  2. Williams-Forson, Psyche and Jennifer Cognard-Black “Where Are the Women in the Food Studies Classroom? Ruminations on Teaching Gender and Race in the Food Studies Classroom.” Feminist Studies, vol. 40, no. 2, 2014, pp. 304-332.  
  3. Appadurai, Arjun. “How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 30, no. 1, Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 3–24, doi:10.1017/S0010417500015024. 
  4. Witt, Doris. Black Hunger Soul Food and America. 1st University of Minnesota Press ed., University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
  5. Fretwell, Erica. “Black Power in the Kitchen.” The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food, edited by J. Michelle Coghlan, Cambridge University Press, 2020, pp. 182-196. 
  6. Long, Lucy M. “Constructing an Imagined Dinner Table: Culinary Nationalism and the ‘Ethnic American Cooking’ Cookbook.” Western Folklore, vol. 80, Western States Folklore Society, 2021, 45-81. 
  7. Roth, LuAnne. “Do the [White] Thing: What Oppositional Gaze Narratives Reveal about Culinary Nationalism and Whiteness.” Western Folklore, vol. 80, Western States Folklore Society, 2021, pp. 81-117.  

Academic Journal:

  1. Food, Culture, & Society. Association for the Study of Food and Society, 2004.

Keywords or Key Terms:

  1. Critical Race Theory
  2. Postcolonialism
  3. Diaspora
  4. Ethnic
  5. American
  6. Gender

Explanatory Essay:

I had a hard time even trying to choose a topic because there are so many topics that I want to research, but I finally settled on the significance of race in cookbooks. I spoke with Professor Phillips via email, as I had my first-year seminar, Gender and Food Culture, with her and the connection of race and cooking came up briefly. Professor Phillips offered an extensive list and I selected some texts from it and others in my own time that I think would help open up my research about race and cookbooks. I only included one cookbook as of right now because I wanted to look at articles that examined this connection to see existing scholarly work and find where I could offer a unique argument/addition to the field. I am still not quite sure as to what exactly I want to do, but I think it could be interesting to read cookbooks written by Americans who are a part of the Asian, Latin American, or African ethnicity or race, because the cultural conflicts and diaspora that these communities experience as not just being American, but also having cultural heritage can have a large impact on what they include or decide to write in their cookbooks. Cookbooks are an interesting genre of literature, as they include a lot of personal narration, which could answer these questions around how race, particularly being American and of cultural heritage, and how that affects one’s journey, decisions to include certain recipes over others, and how food impacted their life.

Update:

I decided to exclude the “postcolonialism” keyword because my research of primary texts did not include nor focus on the presence on colonialism and its effects. I decided to instead include gender, as it cannot be excluded in the discussion of food and cooking, but more importantly the words “ethnic” and “American”. In my research of various cookbooks, the binary between “cultural/ethnic” food and “American” food has appeared many times, and I would like to focus on these two terms to see how the meaning of these words affect the discussion of cultural food and the experience of Americans of various races and ethnicities.

The cookbooks I found thus far focus on the cuisine and experience of African-American and  Indian-American individuals, but I have found two interesting sources from the late 1800s and early 1900s to see how “ethnic” food and “American” cuisine were defined during these times, to see how if these perceptions have had lasting effects on the discussion of food and cooking in the United States.