At 118 text pages, African American Food Culture is a modest undertaking, a volume in the Greenwood Press Food Cultures in America series, whose other entries have been similarly brief and devoted in large part to the identification of source and resource materials. Although I have not examined each of the other four titles in the series currently in print, the formula appears to have yielded mixed results.
The components of African American Food Culture are several and varied: acknowledgements and an introduction; a lengthy chronology; seven brief chapters, each with notes and bibliography; a resource guide; a select bibliography which is drawn largely from the chapter bibliographies; and uncredited recipes, which pop up in the chapter texts at irregular intervals. In a technical sense, this is what African American Food Culture contains.
In substance, the book contains even less than its brief length might suggest. The first thing it lacks is a shortcoming found in each of the five Food Culture in America series: a plural “s” that should appear at the end of the word “Culture.” This is not a minor style point. None of the broad culture groups addressed in the series—Asian, Latino, Jewish, regional American, and African American—are well-served by the mistaken historical assumption that the foodways of African American, Asian American, Latino, Jewish American, and regional American people are best understood by sticking to the stuff held in common by diverse cultural groups.
Of course, writing about African American foods in its historical and ethnographic diversity is a larger task than that undertaken by this book—one that most likely could not be contained in a couple hundred pages. But it would be a substantial, timely, and—yes—necessary improvement over the out-of-date generalist information about African Americans and what they eat that fills this text and its bibliographic sources. Although the term “African American” has utility in grouping together a great many communities of varied history, culture, and foods, African American Food Culture is really what you get when you ignore cultural variations and posit a mainstream that probably never existed in the first place, except perhaps in stereotype.
For me, the greatest concern about this book is that it is presented as a resource. Heaven knows, a resource guide for the study of African American foodways is well overdue. The historical sources for such a work are scattered across more than a dozen languages and a spectrum of cultural communities that display both disparate and common cultural features, some that pre-date slavery days, others as new as this month’s immigrants. African American Food Culture is not the resource guide that scholars, researchers, and teachers want and need.
It would not be fair for this review to conclude without speaking more directly to what the book contains. The fact that it isn’t what I think it should be is not, after all, the fault of the author. The text relies upon period cookbooks a great deal, and does a good job distinguishing between published cooking rules and practices that pertain to the kitchens of high society and those that speak to home cooks. Literacy only becomes a voice for most African American cooks, and especially groups of African American women organized into sororities and professional societies in the early 1950s. So, individual cookbooks and recipes become anagrams to be decoded rather than reliable information about the people presumed to write or use them. In African American Food Culture this useful discussion is also too brief. Which is, perhaps, the lower-case version of the book’s problem.
For folklorists, there are a great many carefully curated sources for the study of African American foodways, including those to be found in Roger Abrahams and John Szwed’s bibliographic study Afro-American Folk Culture (1979). It’s a better foundation upon which to build a better scholarship. Which is, after all, the fundamental desire we share with the people we study.
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[Review length: 646 words• Review posted on January 25, 2018]