A Mess of Greens

The relative scarcity of research on the history of southern foods is surprising, especially given how strongly food is bound up in the region's identity. Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt's study of the social, political, and economic significance of southern women and food between the 1870s and the 1930s is, therefore, a welcome addition to the literature. She argues that gender, class, and race shaped women's acquisition, production, and consumption of food in the American South. An American studies and women's studies scholar, Engelhardt situates her own southern family's foodways in the region's long-standing association between cuisine and status. She acknowledges, for instance, that her family more often ate dove and squirrel than the archetypal markers of southern identity, barbecued pork and fried chicken. Contextualizing her family's customs in the broader southern experience enables Engelhardt to analyze the private world of women and food that centered on knowledge and experiences shared in the kitchen, and to expose women's public roles and influence in shaping the importance of food to identity

Aesthetics · Art · Consumption (sociology · Dove · Economics · Ethnology · Food studies · Foodways · Geography · Identity (music · Political science · Politics · Scarcity · Social science · Sociology · American History and Culture · Anthropology · Architecture, Design, and Social History · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Gender Studies · History · Law