Bound to the fire : how Virginia's enslaved cooks helped invent American cuisine /

Enslaved men and women were valued, valuable property in the southern US. Their labors were a critical component of the vaunted "southern hospitality," their skills honed by years of training, backbreaking hours, and seemingly impossible demands to keep their masters'--and mistresses'--tables filled day in and day out. Their relatively privileged status was always undergirded by their status as slaves and the vulnerability of their bodies. Some poisoned their masters; others ran away; many endured years of violence. Deetz takes on the challenging task of examining the history of enslaved cooks through an archaeology of kitchens and outbuildings and by tracing outlines of individual lives from scant historical records. The result is a fascinating but sometimes thin account, illustrative of the invisibility of individuals whose work was central to the public performance of plantation culture. The work would have been stronger with better editing. Theory and analysis are sometimes repetitive and obvious. Too often the author provides a quotation followed by a "translation" rather than allowing the original voice to speak for itself. In a historical work designed to allow silenced voices to be heard, this particular quirk is jarring. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above. --Anne Babette Audant, CUNY Kingsborough Community College

*Starred Review* Aunt Jemima syrup and Uncle Ben's rice reinforce imagery of friendly black cooks, which Deetz's first book redefines as part of the racist ideology that left the primary contributions enslaved Afro-Virginian cooks made to American cuisine unacknowledged. Her book, nine years in the researching and writing, calls upon plantations still giving tours, historians, chefs, and all Americans to develop an honest awareness of enslaved cooks, specifically in Virginia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The very architecture of the white elite's preferred Georgian-style mansion replicated in the landscape the separation, control, and power needed to enact enslavement. Kitchens were liminal spaces apart from main houses, which were semipublic entertainment venues. As abolitionist thinking took root, homes evolved to include covered walkways and dumbwaiters, keeping black people hidden while they created meals for white people. Herself a former cook, Deetz ensures her readers understand the significant intellect, physical strength, endurance, and capabilities required for enslaved cooks to produce four meals per day from scratch in hot, open-hearth kitchens while under the constant threat of psychological abuse and violence. Scholarly yet readable, Deetz's book honors these American ancestors by reclaiming their rightful places and stories.--Dziuban, Emily Copyright 2017 Booklist

Deetz, an assistant professor of history at Roanoke College and a former chef, illuminates the real lives of enslaved cooks on the plantations of 18th- and 19th-century Virginia. Images of African-American cooks in American popular culture, such as Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben, are largely advertising agency creations associated with servility rather than with creativity or self-determination, she argues. But these men and women shaped both plantation life and Southern cuisine, while occupying a kitchen space that was "a crossroads between black and white worlds." Though few of these enslaved women and men left written records of their experiences, Deetz draws on sources that include runaway-slave ads, travelogues, and recipe collections in order to catch glimpses of cooks in the kitchen and beyond. Her vivid portraits reveal these cooks producing the African-influenced dishes at the core of Southern hospitality, and occasionally poisoning their owners with those same dishes. Most importantly, Deetz recasts the image of the plantation cook as a figure of power, dignity, and, frequently, resistance. This is a lively and insightful account of a still-largely-unfamiliar aspect of the history of American slavery. Illus. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.