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Recipes Exist In The Moment: Cookbooks And Culture In The Post-Civil War South, Kelsielynn Ruff

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Cookbooks manifested Southern archetypes between the late 1860s and the early 2000s. From the late 1800s through 1945, cookbooks exemplified Jim Crow with racist language, stereotyped illustrations, and marginalization of black laborers. Almost at the same time, an ideological belief that glorified the South's loss in the Civil War and romanticized the leaders and fallen soldiers as heroes, called the Lost Cause, appeared in cookbooks. Whites used reminiscence about antebellum society, memorialization of Civil War heroes, and coded language to support Lost Cause beliefs. As the twentieth century progressed, the racial tensions morphed, and the civil rights movement came to …