ABSTRACT
The Black woman cook—overweight, decked out in snowy apron, undisputed genius of the American kitchen—is an image too well inscribed on the collective American unconscious. One southern culinary historian, John Egerton, concisely describes this difficult-to-eradicate stereotype:
They [Black women chefs] were “turbaned mammies” and “voodoo magicians” and “tyrants” who ruled the back rooms with simpleminded power; they could work culinary miracles day in and day out, but couldn’t for the life of them tell anyone how they did it. Their most impressive dishes were described as “accidental” rather than planned. Their speech, humorously conveyed in demeaning dialect in many an old cookbook, came across as illiterate folk knowledge and not to be taken seriously. 1
