The Problem with Culinary Nostalgia

There is more than one way to engage with the food of the past. One approach is to use food as a way to learn about history, to learn about historical processes, to understand cultural and social dynamics of the time. The goal is to arrive at a better, sometimes different, understanding of the past. Another way is to indulge in culinary nostalgia. In that case, it doesn’t matter if we learn something, in fact, reinforcing already established ideas and beliefs might actually be the point. It serves to advance the notion that the particular past in question was better, and, in the process, people lament the state of the time in which they find themselves.

The first approach I outline is how most of the people who “do” food history broach the issue. But if you spend any time online in food history spaces, you will soon learn that a significant number of people are far more interested in engaging with food from the past in the culinary nostalgia sense. In fact, you don’t have to spend any time at all in those spaces, or even with historians, to see how the romanticizing of the past through food plays out in popular culture. This is especially the case when the past in question is a more recent past. Not 100 years ago, not 400 years ago, but the past of our grandparents and our great grandparents. Certainly, you have heard countless times that the food they ate was better, more pure, less bad for the human body. The fact that none of this is true is its own issue, but romanticizing the past through its food, indulging in culinary nostalgia, can serve a more nefarious purpose even when not explicitly stated. It can serve to revel in the “good old times” and even mourn it. But those good old times were not good for all, and those truly responsible for the food are often erased. Culinary nostalgia can help perpetuate harmful stereotypes as it romanticizes the past because it often ignores the less savory aspects like poverty and oppression. It can sometimes even turn those things into positives.

Thankfully, the harshest extreme of this aspect of culinary nostalgia is slowly fading, but not that long ago it very much ruled the scene. One has only to look at cookbooks published in the aftermath of the American Civil war, and even as late the 1970s, a 100-year long period marked by the longing for and sentimentalizing of the Antebellum and the Jim Crow ereas, to see that the trope of the happy Black person toiling in the kitchen to produce delicious food is alive and well. But this supposedly happy cook, in this trope, rarely comes up with their own recipes. Out of Kentucky Kitchens by Marion Flexner, first published in 1949, with 1989 and 2010 reprints that are in print to this day, has a recipe for “Mother’s De Luxe Cherry Pudding.” a dessert that the author states their “old colored cook used to term ‘scromptuous’ [sic].” Flexner indulges both in reminiscing about the past and in the erasure of the Black cook, whose name we never learn. It was the “colored cook” who made the dessert, but Flexner, attributes the recipe to her mother. Never mind that when describing the likely origins of the recipes in the book she lumps enslaved Africans with white immigrants who “came to ‘Kentucke’ […] to make their homes.”

“The Cook.” Illus. in: Harper's Weekly, v. 12, 1856, Library of Congress http://loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3a42357/

In attributing recipes this way Flaxner is not alone. Cookbook writers have long exalted the food of a past where Black people cooked in white people’s kitchens but given all the credit to the white women who employed them. Goodness forbid that a Black person should actually be the creator of any knowledge. This sentiment was widely present in cookbooks and general culture in well into the 20^th century, even as the talent of Black cooks was praised; even as Black cooks had already been publishing cookbooks of their own. Take, for example, the 1908 book titled Famous Old Receipts: Used A Hundred Years and More in the Kitchens of the North and The South, Contributed by Descendants, by a woman named Jacqueline Harrison Smith. This book first attracted me because it shows that people in the past were also interested in culinary history. Like me, Harrison thought it was important to engage with the culinary past. But that is where our similarities part ways. Harrison is more interested in showcasing a grandiose past, lost to her, than she is about doing anything constructive with the information.

The recipes in the book are contributions that claim to have been passed down through generations, some going back to the 18^th century. All the recipes are credited to someone who appears to be a white person of some social standing, even when it is clear that the actual creator of the recipe wasn’t them. This is not a mistake, nor an oversight, it is explicitly baked, as it were, into the book, as is the nostalgia for a past in which enslaved people did the cooking and everything else.

In the introduction, John Cadwalader writes “‘one hundred years ago and more [the subtitle of the book] brings before us a delightful period in our country’s history, and recalls the generous, cordial feelings which prevailed among our ancestors – that ‘open-handed spirit, frank and blythe, of ancient hospitality,’ which made the homes of the New World all that a stranger could desire.” In very concrete ways, Cadwalader tells the readers exactly what the purpose of this book is: to use old recipes to reminisce about a past where “ancient hospitality” existed on the backs of servants and the enslaved. Harrison’s dedication is just as clear: “Dedicated to The Old Memories which this book will recall of the Hospitable Homes of the North and the South.” 1908 was a mere 43 years after the end of the Civil War. The memories were certainly of a slave-holding nation.

Cadwalader, and by extension Harrison, is not unaware that the majority of the recipes in the book came from people working in the kitchens and not from the men and women to whom they are attributed. They acknowledge as much in a very oblique way. Cadwalader writes “though described as coming from ‘the kitchen,’ they [the recipes] were the work of as gentle dames as ever graced a court,” implying that it was the mistresses of the house and not the cooks who are truly responsible for the creating the recipes, and thus the food, of this “delightful period.” There was, in fact, a long history of white cookbook writers claiming that recipes from Black people needed the intervention of white people to make them usable because those cooks were simply not smart enough or literate enough to write recipes that worked. And, in the end, it was the white mistress who took the credit.

But, in Famous Old Receipts, the erasure of the people really responsible for the food, and the glorification of a slave-holding past don’t end there. Cadwalader laments the loss of that labor, which he misreports, as many others have, as having been given freely and unconditionally. “A hundred years ago,” he says, “so much could be left to faithful servants that even less was required of the heads of households than now.” He continues “there are, alas! No more of those loyal, devoted, if humble, members of the family circle who, in wealth and health, or in trouble, never failed to supply the comforts and maintain the dignity of the old homes.” He drives the point home in no uncertain terms when he says “the colored ‘Aunties’ have disappeared under the changed conditions of the South.” Just in case there were any doubts about this deployment of culinary nostalgia rooted in a deeply racist past – and present to Cadwalader – he hands us the proof unironically.

There are two opposing (and disingenuous) forces here that seem to not register with Cadwalader. On the one hand, the Black “aunties” had full reign of the kitchen and didn’t need much intervention from the lady of the house. On the other hand, those same women were incapable of coming up with their own recipes, which were mostly the work of the “dainty hands” of the housewives and “gentle dames” who wrote them down.

Cadwalader’s description of hospitality in the North is less overtly invested in the image of the faithful Black servant, but their erasure continues as Cadwalader goes on about the few societies that he claims influenced Northern hospitality. At least one of those centers of influence were his own ancestors.

It might seem unfair to be this critical of a 115-year old cookbook and its authors, but this is not an issue entirely of our past. This representation of food in the past and of the people who cooked it, created it, and managed it, has endured well into our own lifetime. The trope of the Black mammy persists to this day. Just remember the heated arguments that ensued after Quaker decided to remove the image of the Black woman from its Aunt Jemima product packaging. Some people refuse to let go of this past. Though the image of the faithful Black servant or slave is slowly fading, after all the majority of us have no such memories ourselves, there are other aspects of the past that people seek to romanticize, and aspects of the present they seek to de-legitimize, through culinary nostalgia. This is, of course, not to say that culinary nostalgia is always bad. There are very good reasons why some of us might be nostalgic about the food of our childhood, for instance, and nostalgia in any form is simply part of human nature. The problem arises when we use food in history in ways that erase people, long for the oppression of people, and are damaging both to historical memory and the lived present. While it is too late for early 20^th century people like Jacqueline Harrison Smith and John Cadwalader, we can avoid the pitfalls of culinary nostalgia, but first we must acknowledge that it can be exclusionary, misleading, and problematic. 

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Housekeeping

• In the next post, I’m going to share a recipe from Famous Old Receipts.

• Shortly after the publication of this post I’m going to be traveling to Pakistan for a few weeks. If you want to follow that trip for food content, find me at NYCityFare. If you want to follow for travel and photo content, find me at Juneisy Hawkins. Both on Instagram.