Southern Cooking a Century Ago A peek into a GA Cook Book of 1921
Most people read cookbooks looking for recipes. Students of cookbooks, however, are less concerned about individual recipes than about the general shape of the book—what sections appear, in what order, with what messages. When the cookbook is put together by a committee rather than a single author, these matters become quite interesting because everything that appears is a matter of negotiation. A picture of a community, a time, of skill emerges. Recently I was looking at the Atlanta Women’s Club Cook Book published in 1921.
The initial draw was that it contained an entire chapter on sweet potato recipes-twenty five in all contributed from club members across the state that range from the traditional pones to “sweet potato delight.” [I feel a special sense of dread when the word delight appears in a recipe title.] You can imagine the dish—baked yams tarted up with raisins, nuts, coconut, marshmallows, and extra sugar. I understood the back story of sweet potato delight—the promotion campaigns of the California Raisin council in the early twentieth century—the nut cookery boom of the late 1890s, the invention of the starch moghul system that allowed confectioners at the turn of the twentieth century to eliminate mallow root and mass manufacture marshmallows out of corn starch, gelatin, and sugar, the transformation of coconut from an exotic ingredient to a grocery store staple in the late nineteenth century because of Smith and Malby’s “Machine for Paring Coconut Meats” (patented 1875) that enabled the industrial production and distribution of shredded “dessicated coconut.” A perfect storm of industrial food processing produces just one thing . . . “delight.”
But sweet potato delight is something of an oddity. Most of the recipes in the section reflect the enduring tradition of cookery. And only the salads chapter can be said to be dominated by “delightful” thinking. In 1913 the Georgia Chamber of Commerce had engaged in a hugely popular statewide campaign of local food celebration. Each county and hotel in the state was challenged to stage a meal featuring the best items and dishes associated with their place—menus were printed in the state papers. So traditional GA dishes rose to consciousness, and they appear throughout the Atlanta Women’s Club Cook-Book but with some curious exceptions. The old southern breakfast with the exception of hominy grits, steamed rice, and friend Indian pudding has been jettisoned as unhealthy and supplanted by fresh fruits and cereal. The breakfast chapter reflects another dimension of the cook book, its vocal commitment to domestic science and home economics. Entire chapters are devoted to pantry organization and the requisites of good order in the kitchen. The cookbook itself is the production of the “Home Economics Department” of the Woman’s Club.
So why are jazz age southern white women embracing the ideals of the New England domestic science of the previous century? I suspect it is because since the turn of the twentieth century increasing numbers of white women were engaged in kitchen labor in their own households—work that was done by African American women previously. [The turn of the century Picayune Creole Cook Book is quite explicit that its recipes are meant to educate white women who are having to cook because they can’t afford the rising costs of black labor.] Home economics and domestic science vest kitchen labor with an aspect of intellectual work redeeming it from drudgery. I won’t belabor the ironies of celebrating traditional southern recipes traditionally created by black cooks dressed in the rhetoric of women’s club scientific domesticity.
Yet I don’t doubt that these Atlanta women appreciated the stakes of publishing their cookbook. Southern food had long suffered attacks from the dietetic wing of the northern domestic science crusaders. Magazines abounded in caricatures of overcooked pole beans swimming in pork fat, pellagra ridden cornbread devotees, gloppy one pot stews, and overly spiced entrees. The aesthetic splendor of southern food was a given for these Atlanta ladies, and for that reason it included a chapter [XIV] devoted to the one branch of southern food that developed a northern cachet in the previous decades—Creole Cooking. National magazines had taken up Creole food and Creole New Orleans generally in eighteen eighty five. It remained in fashion ever since. To show that GA cooking stood in a continuum with Creole, Chapter XIII is devoted to early GA/Atlanta cookery.
The very best chapter for traditional southern recipes—that on vegetables. The second best? A tie between pickles and sweet potatoes. You have the expected fat chapters devoted to cakes, baked goods, and puddings. Home canning was enjoying its heyday, so you have a useful chapter devoted to best practices. The chapter devoted the Recipes for Special Occasions was a cordoned off section devoted to cosmopolitan recipes for goulash, spaghetti, New England boiled dinners, and stuffed green peppers.
A link to the cookbook: https://archive.org/details/atlantawomanaclu00atla/page/n5/mode/2up