Defining Black and Indigenous Knowledge in 1600-1850 Recipe Books
On March 26, 2025, I attended a lecture by Dr. Amanda Herbert, who studies gender and sexuality alongside health and food as a professor of the Early Modern Americas at Durham University (“Dr Amanda Herbert”). Herbert’s lecture, “Authorship, Authenticity, Black Erasure: British Atlantic Recipe Books, 1600-1850″1 examined colonial and British recipe writers’ appropriation of Black and Indigenous ingredients, technologies, and preparation methods, or “food ways.”
When I arrived in the Semans Lecture Hall for Herbert’s presentation, I did not realize that she would center Anglo cookbook authors’ “elision” of Black and Indigenous culinary contributions. I had learned about the lecture from flyers that promised to focus on recipes, and I was so excited to attend a scholarly discussion of cuisine that I did not read its full description. I was also surprised to discover that the lecture was part of the History Department’s Kelley Honors Program and therefore so well-attended that I had to sit all the way in the back of the room. However, other attendees’ enthusiasm, Herbert’s open smile, and the lecture’s focus on justice only increased my interest in the event, and I prepared to take notes attentively.
I found Herbert’s presentation’s structure evident, logical, and easy to follow from the beginning of her presentation, when she began by emphasizing an unambiguous thesis: British Atlantic cookbooks from 1600 to 1850 did not acknowledge their reliance on Black and Indigenous knowledge and labor. To demonstrate that non-acknowledgement, Herbert analyzed the rhetorical structures of several cookbooks from the relevant period, including those attributed to white plantation managers Eliza Lucas Pinckney and Nelly Custis Lewis (“Eliza;” Thompson). White authors’ exclusion of and appropriation from Black and Indigenous people seemed obvious once Herbert showed me what to look for. For example, Herbert demonstrated, recipe authors listed prepared ingredients without acknowledging the enslaved Black labor that made those ingredients available. Furthermore, white authors rarely noted Black and Indigenous influence on their recipes, and when they did cite non-white ideas, they qualified that white community members also approved of Black and Indigenous contributions. That third-party reassurance was not necessary for recipes from white relatives and friends. I found Herbert’s interpretation of these texts fascinating on a methodological level: I had not realized a recipe’s assumptions and structure could support a scholarly argument. Her ideas’ logical structure also persuaded me that, as she originally asserted, recipe books from the 1600s to 1850s appropriated Black and Indigenous ideas.
Once she established white authors’ recipes as appropriative, Herbert called for the audience to reinterpret their understanding of “collaboration” and “contribution” within recipe Atlantic recipe books. During this part of her lecture, Herbert continued to consider recipes’ language, but she reinforced her conclusions with research grounded in historical trends rather than words—a method that, like her previous examination of writers’ “elisions” and attributions, intrigued me. For example, Herbert explained that by contributing ingredients like yams and techniques like steaming rice to Atlantic cookbooks, oppressed voices strongly influenced Atlantic cooking—but their “contribution” went unacknowledged. Herbert therefore called for the audience to reevaluate “collaboration” and “contribution” within recipe books as incomplete and appropriative. Yet I felt that this section of her lecture lacked clarity on a key point from her lecture’s introduction: agency. At the beginning of her lecture, Herbert asserted that Black and Indigenous people retained agency within Atlantic recipe books. However, her analysis left me with the understanding that Black and Indigenous individuals did not choose to preserve or share their knowledge through cookbooks. Instead, I found that their situation demonstrated recipe authors’ oppression of their agency rather than an expression of their power. I would have been curious to hear how Herbert interpreted “agency” within that context, but instead, I left feeling that she had not addressed it.
However, even though she did not ultimately emphasize agency, I feel confident in reporting Herbert’s lecture as a success because she successfully persuaded me that Black knowledge and food ways were appropriated by, but evident in, historical cookbooks. During the relevant period, white recipe writers’ understanding of “contribution” did not recognize stolen labor and knowledge, and their portrayal of “collaboration” either misconstrued enslaved people’s contributions as voluntary or ignored non-white input entirely. Herbert’s lecture broadened my worldview and made me rethink Black and Indigenous people’s unacknowledged “contribution” to and “collaboration” on Atlantic recipes. Her lecture wasn’t quite the scholarly discussion on recipes that I had expected. However, her close attention to the words of those recipes and her clear elucidation of the insights they revealed made me feel that her lecture was well worth attending anyway.
- Davidson College advertised the event as “Authorship, Authenticity, Erasure: British Atlantic Women’s Recipe Books, 1600-1850” rather than “Authorship, Authenticity, Black Erasure: British Atlantic Recipe Books, 1600-1850.” I do not know whether the difference reflects a miscommunication, mistake, last-minute editing decision, or intentional effort to highlight Black versus women’s positions in the lecture. However, I find the shift and the speculations it invites (literally) noteworthy.
↩︎
Works Consulted
“Dr Amanda Herbert.” Durham University, 2024, www.durham.ac.uk/staff/amanda-herbert/.
“Eliza Lucas Pinckney.” National Park Service, 12 February 2025, www.nps.gov/chpi/learn/historyculture/eliza-lucas-pinckney.htm.
“Authorship, Authenticity, Erasure: British Atlantic Women’s Recipe Books, 1600-1850.” Davidson College History Department, March 2025. Flyer.
Herbert, Amanda. “Authorship, Authenticity, Black Erasure: British Atlantic Recipe Books, 1600-1850.” Davidson College Kendrick K. Kelley Lecture, 26 March 2025, Semans Lecture Hall, Tom and Katherine Belk Visual Arts Center, Davidson College, Davidson, NC. Lecture and slideshow presentation.
“Kendrick Kelley Honors Program.” Davidson College, www.davidson.edu/academic-
departments/history/major-and-minor/honors.
Thompson, Mary V. “Eleanor “Nelly” Parke Custis.” George Washington’s Mount Vernon, 2025, www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/eleanor-nelly-parke-custis.
