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Beyond the Ancestral Skillet: Four Louisiana Women and Their Cookbooks, 1930-1970

Cookbooks have a unique ability to record women.s history, both private and public. Cookbooks transmit not only instructions for preparing specific dishes, but also the values of class, race and gender of the times and places in which they are created. This study will focus on several such cookbooks produced by Louisiana women in the mid-twentieth century, from the 1930s to the 1970s. Different though these works are, they collectively demonstrate that the best cookbook authors are purveyors not only of recipes, but also of class values, ethnic relations and folklore, and gender models that one generation of women endeavors to transmit to the next. Most important, this study will argue that these cookbooks provide a rich and penetrating insight into the class structure in rural Louisiana, race and accomplishment in an era of segregation, and the role of gender in domestic and professional occupation.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:uno.edu/oai:scholarworks.uno.edu:td-1932
Date15 May 2009
CreatorsWolfe, Rachael
PublisherScholarWorks@UNO
Source SetsUniversity of New Orleans
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceUniversity of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

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