Abstract
In the first half of the twentieth century, led by an increasingly racially mixed upper class creole community, Jamaican cookbooks transition from hosting the projects of white creole West Indian women – community building, self-fashioning and “defense of native style” – to offering recipes for an independent national culture that embrace and hold up the creole as the confluence of African, Indigenous, European, and Asian traditions and as the foundational flavor of independence. This paper starts by tracing the shape and trajectory of this transition across four cookbooks published between Mrs. F.H. Watkins’s 1908 West India Recipes and the 1957 Farmer’s Food Manual whose publication marks a clear turn to recipes for an independent Jamaica. I argue that these cookbooks demonstrate continuity from the work of white Creoles in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. They exhibit the shifting definitions of the term Creole and notions of Creoleness as well as the grip of white Creole culture and power in Jamaica well past political independence. In the decade after the Farmer’s Food Manual, the Black Nationalist recipes that had been simmering finally came to the fore. The paper turns in its second half to examining the interplay between politics and cookbooks, national taste, and gustatory independence as it examines how cookbooks configure and reconfigure Jamaican cuisine as the centerpiece of the long British Empire, the new nation on the world stage, and black nationalism in the new world in conjunction with similar patterns in the political sphere.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2021 Special Focus–Making Sense from Taste: Quality, Context, Community
KEYWORDS
Jamaica, Caribbean, Colonialism, Independence, Cookbooks, Nationalism, Decolonization, Recipes, Black Nationalism
