Consuming Memories: Food and Childhood in Postbellum Plantation Memoirs and Reminiscences

Abstract

The nostalgia created by and within postbellum plantation memoirs and reminiscences has been little explored. By scrutinizing the usefulness of nostalgia as a lens through which to focus critical thinking on the construction, uses and maintenance of individual and collective memory, this article uses this genre of autobiographical life writing to outline assumptions about the Old South plantation imaginary, its kitchens and cooks, as well as the presentation of food and its preparation. By exploring the ways in which memories of food and happy childhood days were used to codify nostalgic forms of the antebellum era, the article contends that food played an important symbolic role in framing and reflecting power relations and patriarchal authority as the Old South gave way to the New.

Heritage and food history

“…In relation to the more or less recent past, for example, historians have investigated the symbolic and identity meanings of food for certain social classes, involving reconstruction of rituals and venues (Bouchet 2016;Erby 2017), and more generally the eating habits of the middle and working classes (Finn 2017;Lloyd 2015;Ray 2015;Scholliers 2012), as well as specific profiles linked to working in the food system -from chefs to food industry workers - (Olmedo 2015; Van den Eeckhout 2013); they have probed feeding patterns in specific collective experiences or extreme situations -school, hospital, prison, war (Collingham 2013;Hawkins and Tanner 2016;Maes, Vanhouche, Scholliers and Beyens 2017) -often looking at objects of material culture connected with eating. The recent literature has been concerned with food heritages with religious connotations (Avieli 2009;Freidenreich 2014), as well as gender dynamics filtered through the lens of food consumption and preparation, especially focusing on the role of women in what tends to be conceived as a feminine domain (Cairns and Johnston 2015; Jones-Gailani 2017; Segalla 2016; Szabo and Koch 2017) -at least in the home -as well as on generational identities displayed through tastes and feeding habits (Anderson 2017;Tichit 2015).…”