Contextualizing Creole Cuisine: Reading Ethnicity, Race, and Gender in New Orleans Menus and Community Cookbooks, 1930–65

In 1938, the Federal Writers’ Project published its New Orleans City Guide, with chapters on restaurants, Creole cuisine, history, race, and leisure culture, plus several “motor tours” of the city. A federally funded project, the City Guide strove to render New Orleans more legible and attractive to tourists, neatly packaging its history and cuisine as consumable goods. In this paper, I juxtapose this New Deal text with contemporaneous “texts” of another sort: menus from New Orleans restaurants and community cookbooks published by women’s social clubs and charitable and religious organizations. In these works that were alternately ephemeral and domestic, the authors spun histories that together revealed the tense relationship between forces of modernization, nostalgia, and persistent segregation in New Orleans before and after World War II.

In choosing menus and cookbooks as my primary sources, I take the lead from scholars of other disciplines – namely English and Women’s Studies – who for decades have read between recipes’ lines to find economic, social, and cultural histories extending far beyond kitchen work and food production. Placing New Orleans menus and cookbooks from the same era aside one another forces productive distinctions in the realms of ethnicity, race, and gender. Menus were implicated in the performative, public consumption of food in restaurants, often with a male chef in the kitchen and African Americans in service capacities at best. Cookbooks, in contrast, were frequently authored by women for women and published on a small scale, intended for other members of their circle, with recipes destined for the home table.

Reading these culinary texts as both historical and literary sources permits the scholar to hear voices less frequently recorded by more traditional histories. Together they contributed to a larger conversation about the meaning of Creole identity at mid-century, who produced it, and who consumed.