Cooking in Other Women's Kitchens by Rebecca Sharpless

Author:Rebecca Sharpless [Sharpless, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies, Women's Studies, History, United States, General
ISBN: 9781469611020
Google: ilUraQwb9t4C
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2013-02-01T05:36:13+00:00

My first job doing family cooking was for a Mrs. Patterson on Wilson Court in Chapel Hill. (All I ever knew her as was ‘Mrs. Patterson’; at that time, blacks used only the last names of their employers.) . . . One day Mrs. Patterson told me to cook some sweet potatoes. She didn't say they were for a pie for dessert, but I just assumed that they were and boiled them. I guessed wrong, however, as she wanted them for the main dinner (though I never knew exactly how she wanted them cooked). When I realized my mistake, I decided to try something—I was never given recipes or a cookbook on my cooking jobs—so I mashed them and then put butter, Karo syrup, canned milk, orange juice, a handful of sugar, and a pinch of salt in them. The thought came to me to squeeze the oranges and put the potato mixture in the orange peel cups, then bake them.

Council feared the worst from her experiment: “At supper time, I set the table and put the food on, but I was so afraid of what I had done with the sweet potatoes that as they sat down I went to stand at the swinging door to hear if I was going to get fired. But what I heard them say was that the potatoes were sooo good. My heart said, ‘Yes, yes, yes, Dip.’ And I've been making up my own recipes and cooking them ever since.”24 Council successfully turned her employer's hazy instructions into a culinary tour de force. The incident could just as easily have gone against her favor, however, and would have almost surely done so with an employee less talented than Council, who would not have had the creativity to switch from dessert to side dish with facility.

Because they typically changed jobs so often, cooks had to learn to please many different types of employers.25 Letters of recommendation generated by employers in the 1920s point to both the characteristics that white women desired and the difficulty of making happy a disparate set of employers. Positive references praised women for their cooking ability, their effort, their kindness to the children in the family, their honesty and reliability, their cleanliness, and their adventurousness in trying new dishes. But the same woman might garner employers’ opinions directly in conflict with one another. One Baltimore cook received one reference announcing, “Is not a good cook” and a second one remarking, “Very good cook. Efficient, clean, honest.”26 What satisfied one employer might not satisfy another. It was up to the cook to figure out the differences and negotiate them.27

IN THE JIM CROW SOUTH, race as well as sex affected relationships between employer and employee, as it did nearly everything else.28 The employer and employee involved in domestic work typically were of different races. Until after World War II, almost all employers of domestic workers in the South were white. Although a very few wealthy African Americans hired domestic workers, researcher Carter Woodson observed in 1933, “The Negroes of today are unable to employ one another.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.