No Cooks in the Kitchen: Writing Women of Color Into the Louisiana Foodways Curriculum

• In Event: Broadening Curriculum Spaces: Context and the Politics of Inclusion

Abstract

For this project, we looked at the intersection of race and gender in the Louisiana Creole plantation kitchen. In tropes about Louisiana and its foodways, women of color have been stereotyped into the space of the Creole kitchen as mammies and her “othered” iterations. However, plantation documents and historical narratives have not acknowledged these women as pedagogues who transformed the Creole kitchen into a fluid learning space. Using plantation blueprints, personal correspondence, slave narratives, and historic cookbooks, we sketched out a history of learning that mapped how complexities of race and gender were negotiated in the practice of everyday life. This process of invisibility continues into present-day Louisiana, where cooking and the kitchen continue to be a male domain.

Authors

• Danielle Jan Klein, Louisiana State University

• Berlisha R. Morton, Colgate University