Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
199
result(s) for
"Rebecca Sharpless"
Sort by:
Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens
As African American women left slavery and the plantation economy behind, many entered domestic service in southern cities and towns. Cooking was one of the primary jobs they performed in white employers' homes, feeding generations of white families and, in the process, profoundly shaping southern foodways and culture.Rebecca Sharpless argues that, in the face of discrimination, long workdays, and low wages, African American cooks worked to assert measures of control over their own lives and to maintain spaces for their own families despite the demands of employers and the restrictions of segregation. Sharpless also shows how these women's employment served as a bridge from old labor arrangements to new ones. As opportunities expanded in the twentieth century, most African American women chose to leave cooking for more lucrative and less oppressive manufacturing, clerical, or professional positions.Through letters, autobiography, and oral history, this book evokes African American women's voices from slavery to the open economy, examining their lives at work and at home. Sharpless looks beyond stereotypes to introduce the real women who left their own houses and families each morning to cook in other women's kitchens.
eBook
Dethroning the deceitful pork chop : rethinking African American foodways from slavery to Obama
Uses a variety of methodological perspectives to demonstrate that throughout time black people have used both overt and subtle food practices to resist white oppression.
Book
Grain and Fire
While a luscious layer cake may exemplify the towering glory of southern baking, like everything about the American South, baking is far more complicated than it seems. Rebecca Sharpless here weaves a brilliant chronicle, vast in perspective and entertaining in detail, revealing how three global food traditions-Indigenous American, European, and African-collided with and merged in the economies, cultures, and foodways of the South to create what we know as the southern baking tradition. Recognizing that sentiments around southern baking run deep, Sharpless takes delight in deflating stereotypes as she delves into the surprising realities underlying the creation and consumption of baked goods. People who controlled the food supply in the South used baking to reinforce their power and make social distinctions. Who used white cornmeal and who used yellow, who put sugar in their cornbread and who did not had traditional meanings for southerners, as did the proportions of flour, fat, and liquid in biscuits. By the twentieth century, however, the popularity of convenience foods and mixes exploded in the region, as it did nationwide. Still, while some regional distinctions have waned, baking in the South continues to be a remarkable, and remarkably tasty, source of identity and entrepreneurship.
eBook
Going Dutch
Last year, I bit the bullet, so to speak, and bought two Le Creuset pots that the upscale neighborhood chain calls \"Dutch ovens.\" After more than thirty years of use by me and at least that many by my Aunt Exa before that, my WearEver aluminum set had become pitted and just about worn out, deserving of a happy retirement in the utility room cabinet. The new pots are gorgeous-a shade of yellow that back in my youth we called \"harvest gold.\" Their enamel surfaces gleam under the lights above the stovetop. I christened the first one with coq au vin at my friend Joan Browning's suggestion and in the ensuing months have used the two pots for everything from chili (with the Wick Fowler seasoning beloved by Texans) to banana pudding for my husband's eightieth birthday (made to his longstanding preferences: the recipe from the Nabisco Nilla Wafer box, double custard, no meringue).
Journal Article
HOECAKE
Growing up in Maryland, the great thinker and writer Frederick Douglass heard a fellow enslaved person sing:
We raise de wheat,
Dey gib us de corn;
We bake de bread,
Dey giv us de crust;
We sif de meal,
Dey gib us de huss.¹
Transcribing the passage into his book The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Douglass described it as “a sharp hit . . . to the meanness of slaveholders.” From the time they arrived in America until emancipation, enslaved people saw the disparities between their diet and that of their enslavers. They ate corn; their enslavers ate
Book Chapter
ACORN BREAD
The first baked goods in the South might seem humble, but getting, processing, and cooking them were far from simple. For maybe 10,000 years before the domestication of corn, southern Native Americans ate bread made from nuts and roots that women gathered while men hunted.¹ From the Gulf Coast to the Chesapeake Bay, oaks, chestnuts, hickories, and black walnut trees rained down their fruits in the fall. Native women ventured to the woods to collect nuts and acorns, loading their heavy booty into baskets they had woven and lugging it back to their homes.
Every year, the pressure to gather
Book Chapter