Recipes of the American South: A Brief Historical Primer through its Cookbooks

Written by Professor Nicolaas Mink, Food Historian

In 1926, The New York Times bemoaned the death of Southern cuisine.  “No better indication of the changes throughout the New South can be found than its new diet,” lamented the Times food editor. ”The South that buys and sells real estate with Yankee shrewdness…that teaches agriculture scientifically in the high schools, fosters home economics clubs and raises great sums for State universities; that supports canning and meat-packing industries…this South is no longer making beaten biscuits, Lady Baltimore cakes and chicken gumbo.”

The New York Times elegy illuminates one of the key tensions inherent in Southern cuisine.  As early as the 1920s, the nation’s food critics recognized that the South’s repast represented a cultural expression that would likely disappear once that region became fully integrated into the modern, industrial, and urban world that seemed to be America’s destiny. In the process, the South’s cuisine came to be defined as a slower cuisine, one that seemed to cut against much of modern America’s fast-paced image. Even today it remains a food with drawl and twang.

Southern cuisine has only been Southern cuisine for the last 150 years. Cooks who plied the culinary waters below the Mason-Dixon Line before the Civil War usually envisioned themselves as part of a state cooking culture. As their titles reflect, antebellum cookbooks like Sarah Rutledge’s The Carolina Receipt Book (1847) or classics like Mary Randolph’s The Virginia Housewife (1836) and Lettice Bryan’s The Kentucky Housewife (1841) never fully adopt a Southern identity.  Rather, their recipes reflected the culinary topography of their individual states far more than any belief in a shared regional cuisine.

The rapid industrialization of the North’s food supply after the Civil War allowed Southern cookery to emerge as a distinct entity on a national stage.  Before that time, Americans, regardless of regional affiliation, were a corn and pork-eating people. One antebellum European visitor went so far as to call the United States “The Republic of Porkdom,” reflecting the extent to which this national antebellum cuisine inundated every nook and cranny of the American diet. With the arrival of industry, the North’s foodways transformed to accommodate wheat and beef, two new staples that were amenable to the industrial food production of the times. Whether true or not, a growing number of Southerners came to view Northerners as wedded to a new system where food came from factories, not homes and farmsteads.   Cuisines across the South could differ radically, but as long as they shunned this Northern-industrial food complex, Southerners could stress their culinary bonds with one another.

As Industrialization took hold of the American food system, Southerners redeemed themselves through their reliance on corn pone, bacon grease, and ham hock, and cookbooks poured forth from presses promoting Southern food as a food apart. Estelle Wilcox’s The Dixie-Cookbook (1883), A.P. Hill’s Mrs. Hills Southern Cookbook (1880), and Emma McKinney’s Aunt Caroline’s Dixieland Recipes (1922) all endorsed this new vision of Southern cookery, and in the process, all of these texts became immensely popular with American cooks. 

Henrietta Stanley Dull’s Southern Cooking (1928) did more to popularize this version of Southern cuisine than any other book of its time.  Still in print more than eight decades after its original publication, Southern Cooking was to Southern cookery what Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961) or Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking School Cook-Book (1896) were to New England and French cuisine: these books literally defined these culinary traditions for the American reading public.  Although her book includes many of the high-brow, cosmopolitan dishes expected from one of Atlanta’s elite, Dull’s recipes for pickled sweet corn, sweet potato croquettes, and Brunswick stew reach into the very soul of the anti-modern impulse that lay at the heart of southern food. For contemporary readers, Dull’s explanation of barbecued pig—complete with instructions for pit digging—is worth the price of the text. 

Equally significant is the role that race has played in shaping these ideas about Southern food.  Indeed, race undergirds everything about Southern cooking precisely because black women cooks emerged in the late nineteenth century as definitive symbols of the anti-commercial and anti-industrial nature of Southern cookery. One need look no further than Quaker Oats’ creation of Aunt Jemima in the 1890’s to suggest how this racialized view of “traditional” Southern food had found a place in America’s food culture.

Of course, black women were the real cooks of the South, despite the fact that the Southern Mammy stereotype combined with their relative silence in the historical record to distort much of the gastronomic world they made.  Nevertheless, foods like yams, gumbo, okra, jambalaya, and black-eyed peas all reflect the culinary artery that ran from coastal Africa through the Caribbean and into the American South. Although few cookbooks authored by black women before the 1930’s exist, those that do, such as Abby Fisher’s What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking (1881) suggest the extent to which black women shaped and reshaped the foods that came to be defined as Southern with unique renditions of jumble cakes, Creole chow chow, quince preserves, jumberlie, and terrapin stew. In the postwar era, the National Council of Negro Women published The Historical Cookbook of the American Negro (1958), providing the single most important window into the relationship between black women cooks and Southern cuisine published in the twentieth century.

The great riddle of Southern cuisine at the beginning of the twentieth-first century takes us back to the elegy The New York Times wrote almost eighty years ago. The rapid modernization of Southern agriculture in recent decades has coincided with the expansion of fast food into the region (the South, as many know, is now Ground Zero of the American fast food economy) to once again help us see more clearly the tension between tradition and modernity that has shaped Southern cuisine since the Civil War. It is this tension that not only makes Southern cuisine a delight to eat, but also a delight to study.