Recipes for Respect - (Southern Foodways Alliance Studies in Culture, People, and P) by Rafia Zafar

About the Book

"Food studies, once trendy, has settled into the public arena. In the academy, scholarship on food and literary culture constitutes a growing river within literary and cultural studies, but writing on African American food and dining remains a small tributary. Recipes for Respect fills this lacuna, illuminating the role of foodways in African American culture. Beginning with the cooks in Uncle Tom's Cabin, if not before, and continuing nearly to the present day, black Americans have been unfairly stereotyped as uneducated culinary geniuses. Rafia Zafar addresses this disparity and highlights not only the long tradition of educated African Americans within our national gastronomic history but also the literary and entrepreneurial strategies for civil rights and respectability woven into the written records of dining, cooking, and serving. Whether revealed in cookbooks or fiction, memoirs or hotel-keeping manuals, agricultural extension bulletins or library collections, the knowledge of foodways supported black strategies for the maintenance of historical memory, the assertion of self-reliance, and the achievement of dignity and civil rights. If, to follow Mary Douglas's dictum, food is a field of action--that is, a venue for social intimacy, exchange, or aggression--African American writing about foodways constitutes an underappreciated intervention into the racialized social and intellectual spaces of the United States"--

Book Synopsis

Food studies, once trendy, has settled into the public arena. In the academy, scholarship on food and literary culture constitutes a growing river within literary and cultural studies, but writing on African American food and dining remains a tributary. Recipes for Respect bridges this gap, illuminating the role of foodways in African American culture as well as the contributions of Black cooks and chefs to what has been considered the mainstream.

Beginning in the early nineteenth century and continuing nearly to the present day, African Americans have often been stereotyped as illiterate kitchen geniuses. Rafia Zafar addresses this error, highlighting the long history of accomplished African Americans within our culinary traditions, as well as the literary and entrepreneurial strategies for civil rights and respectability woven into the written records of dining, cooking, and serving. Whether revealed in cookbooks or fiction, memoirs or hotel-keeping manuals, agricultural extension bulletins or library collections, foodways knowledge sustained Black strategies for self-reliance and dignity, the preservation of historical memory, and civil rights and social mobility. If, to follow Mary Douglas's dictum, food is a field of action--that is, a venue for social intimacy, exchange, or aggression--African American writing about foodways constitutes an underappreciated critique of the racialized social and intellectual spaces of the United States.

Review Quotes

Recipes for Respect is welcome among a recent spate of literature by authors such as Psyche Williams-Forson and Toni Tipton Martin that emphasizes the agency and sophistication of African American food work. . . . Zafar reminds us that food was both a signal of status and a symbol of civil rights.--Angela Jill Cooley "Agricultural History"

Recipes for Respect offers a synthesis of Black authors demonstrating how food writing provides a lens into racial uplift and civil rights.--Angela Jill Cooley "Agricultural History"

Recipes for Respect will become the next notable classic within the canon of African American culinary history.--Dani M. Willcutt "The Journal of African American History"

Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning refutes any notion that African American cooking comes from illiterate cooks, and captures the long history of African American dining, cooking, and serving. It weaves in cultural explorations and insights as it peppers recipes with discussions of the Black Power Movement, early cookbooks by African Americans, changing civil rights perceptions and culinary approaches, and more. By weaving cooking traditions into the mix of history, politics, and social science, this book offers a focus that will lend to its use in college-level classrooms as well as by culinary historians interested in ethnic roots in general and African American food in particular.-- "The Midwest Book Review"

By studying noted culinary texts, including cookbooks, novels, and memoirs, written by African Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Zafar demonstrates that generations of black people understood the cultural, social, and political significance of food.--Jennifer Jensen Wallach "American Historical Review"

Drawing on Mary Douglas's early insight that 'food is a field of social action, ' Rafia Zafar carefully braids strands of culinary history, authorship, and politics in African American culture to demonstrate how writers and cooks (and writer-cooks) used foodways to intervene in questions of political and social advancement. Recipes for Respect is a thoroughly engaging trip through African American gastronomic life that replaces stereotype and flattened ideas about African-American relations with food with a supple, wide-ranging picture of the black men and women who wrote, planted and cooked their way into new positions in American life.--Kim F. Hall "author of Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England"

In Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning, Zafar reminds us that in their roles as growers, harvesters, preparers, and consumers of food-- and as writers about food--Black folks have been documenting the racialized and racist histories of the American project. Zafar shows readers that African American culinary history can be a powerful avenue through which to learn more about US history writ large and to see formerly enslaved peoples of African descent at the center, as laborers and as meaning makers, always reaching for and demanding respect.--Kimberly Nettles-Barcelón "Winterthur Portfolio"

In the academy, scholarship on food and literary culture constitutes a growing river within literary and cultural studies, but writing on African American food and dining remains a tributary. Recipes for Respect bridges this gap, illuminating the role of foodways in African American culture as well as the contributions of Black cooks and chefs to what has been considered the mainstream.-- "Texas Institute for the Preservation of History & Culture Newsletter"

In the exquisitely researched and readable Recipes for Respect, Rafia Zafar carves a space to pause and examine the often-obscured lives of the black authors of American cookbooks, memoirs, hotelkeepers' manuals, agricultural extension bulletins, and personal papers found in private archives and public libraries. . . . Zafar spotlights methods and invites readers from multiple disciplines and backgrounds into the fray. . . . [An] enlightening and concise book.--Jamie Horwitz "Journal of American History"

The clarity of Zafar's prose makes Recipes for Respect accessible to a broad audience even as it advances richly nuanced histories of race and identity. A book of exceptional utility for teaching, Zafar's commentary provides a compelling guide to African American culinary writing from the mid 1800s through the twentieth century.--B.L. Herman "CHOICE Connect"

About the Author

RAFIA ZAFAR is a professor of English, African and African American studies, and American culture studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where she also serves as faculty director of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program. Her previous publications include We Wear the Mask: African Americans Write American Literature, 1760-1870 and the Library of America's two-volume anthology Harlem Renaissance Fiction.