Antecedents, Authenticity and Adaptation in the Nineteenth-century Kitchen
a Case Study of Mobile, Alabama
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/ppc.27745Keywords:
authenticity claims, Antebellum, Mobile, 19th-century, USA, reconciliation cookbooks, recipe lineage, Gulf City Cookbook, social history, Southern cuisine, identity claims, regional culinary history, tradition, cult of domesticity, British adaptations, port cities, church cookbooksAbstract
This articles explores why following the Civil War, middle- and upper-class Mobilians established new rituals masquerading as manifestations of an imagined colonial heritage and formed fluid new élites in response to the stark uncertainties of Reconstruction and the New South. Unlike Atlanta or Nashville, however, Mobile rejected the economic opportunities embodied by railroad and factory for the duration of the nineteenth century. The city remained bound to a past in another way as well. Gulf City indicates that middle- to upperclass Mobilians beset by defeat, decline, depression, dislocation and downward mobility in the second half of the nineteenth century for the most part clung to the comfort of a cuisine that appears nearly colonial in origin.
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