Published in 1912, Bibin’s “Southern Cookbook” documented the invaluable culinary contributions that Black domestic laborers made to Southern cuisine.
"Bread, to me, should be a part of every meal. It is so good, so satisfying." - Edna Lewis
For me, bread represents a break from the cooking traditions of my mom. I've spent thousands of hours with my mom in the kitchen, watching her turn out pastries, cakes, cookies, pies, and everything in between. For a brief time when I was young, she became a freelance cake decorator to help make ends meet. But I never saw her bake a single loaf of bread.
I'm not really sure when or why I became obsessed with bread. I think my mom was disappointed, in a way, because she saw it as a rejection of the baking she tried to pass down. No one in my mom's entire family bake traditional yeasted bread. They make cornbread, biscuits, pancakes, and other "simple breads"; "poor people food", my mom once called them. We bake different biscuits depending on the occasion.
I didn't question why no one in my family had learned to bake traditional yeasted bread until I took a class on food history. It turns out there’s plenty of reasons that two-day-fermented, spelt-blend sourdough breads are not eaten in my family. Some reasons are regional (my mom is from rural Appalachia), others are due to the time in history (baking powder more available than yeast), but the biggest reason is simply class.
Bread, particularly white fluffy bread, has historically belonged to the upper and middle class. I wanted to find out how cookbooks then, contribute to these class hierarchies.