|
Product Description
Combining the study of food culture with gender studies and using perspectives from historical, literary, environmental, and American studies, Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt examines what southern women’s choices about food tell us about race, class, gender, and social power.
Shaken by the legacies of Reconstruction and the turmoil of the Jim Crow era, different races and classes came together in the kitchen, often as servants and mistresses but also as people with shared tastes and traditions. Generally focused on elite whites or poor blacks, southern foodways are often portrayed as stable and unchanging—even as an untroubled source of nostalgia. A Mess of Greens offers a different perspective, taking into account industrialization, environmental degradation, and women’s increased role in the work force, all of which caused massive economic and social changes. Engelhardt reveals a broad middle of southerners that included poor whites, farm families, and middle- and working-class African Americans, for whom the stakes of what counted as southern food were very high.
Five “moments” in the story of southern food—moonshine, biscuits versus cornbread, girls’ tomato clubs, pellagra as depicted in mill literature, and cookbooks as means of communication—have been chosen to illuminate the connectedness of food, gender, and place. Incorporating community cookbooks, letters, diaries, and other archival materials, A Mess of Greens shows that choosing to serve cold biscuits instead of hot cornbread could affect a family’s reputation for being hygienic, moral, educated, and even godly.
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
- Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America (Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History)
- Southern Food and Civil Rights: Feeding the Revolution (American Palate)
- The Larder: Food Studies Methods from the American South (Southern Foodways Alliance Studies in Culture, People, and Place Ser.)
- The Taste of Country Cooking: The 30th Anniversary Edition of a Great Southern Classic Cookbook
- Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time
- Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History
- I Am Not a Tractor!: How Florida Farmworkers Took On the Fast Food Giants and Won
- The Omnivorous Mind: Our Evolving Relationship with Food
- To Live Here, You Have to Fight: How Women Led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice (Working Class in American History)
- Rebellion in Black and White: Southern Student Activism in the 1960s
*If this is not the "Mess of Greens: Southern Gender and Southern Food" product you were looking for, you can check the other results by clicking this link. Details were last updated on Nov 21, 2024 11:52 +08.