Triggering Passages
“In a more abstract sense orality gives the cook her access to power as well; while her mouth may be the subject to middle-class discipline, she has access to her employers’ mouths as well. In fact the cook’s entire worth hinges on her mouth: it metonymizes her essential value as a cook.” (Tompkins 2012: 49)
“Why was such value assigned to spices, particularly in the Old World? Although the answer is complicated (and entire books have been devoted to this subject), one answer is that spices were valued because they were extremely difficult to obtain.” (Newman 2013: 18)
News Media Context
Who Owns Southern Food?
“It is well documented that one of the significant jobs of the house slaves was to prepare the meals for the master, his family and his guests. Many of the recipes that have been passed down for generations in both black and white families and are the backbone of Southern cooking were born out of slavery. It is not the content of the recipes that is missing, but the context.”
“But their children didn’t always embrace the “good old days.” My mother didn’t see Southern food as a badge of honor, she was striving for middle class sameness. There were so many rules of what I could eat inside our home, but never out, especially around white people. We hid our culture in plain sight. It was as if eating lasagna and forgoing black-eyed peas was going to make or break our upward mobility. Food and race in this country are both powerful currencies.”
http://theplate.nationalgeographic.com/2015/12/04/who-owns-southern-food/
Response:
Reading Newman’s chapter on the spice trade I was brought back to a conversation had last week with classmates in regards to the designation of people of color as “spices” in the lives of the white. Newman emphasizes the difficulty in obtaining spices as a substantial rationale for the high value of spices, but given the context of recent discussions and research it is hard to not interpret part of the appeal as a desire for the “exotic” or “the other”.
In contemporary American culture it is not uncommon for “vanilla” to be used colloquially to imply blandness or whiteness, while terms like “spicy”, are used often in regards to latina women or “saucy” in regards to black women, acknowledging their exciting yet inherently disruptive “spice” as a potential threat to whiteness, only to be used in moderation.
Tompkins’s exploration of the hearth of Antebellum America and its symbolic and literal focal point for analysis prompted me to think more critically than I ever had before on the class implications of architectural layouts, particularly in regards to the kitchen and its placement in the home.
In the quoted passage, I was struck by Tompkins’s analysis of the power existing inherently within the black chef’s mouth and the chef’s being taught to “watch her mouth” while at the same time learning to inhabit the mouths of her employers. As Tompkins quotes on the following page “ The Cook’s power lies, here, in exercising orality: in eating and speaking. Both, by presenting the possibility of poisoning, project a sense of the unconscious power dynamic at work in the Antebellum household.” (Tompkins 2012: 50).