Molly Mann

Racialized Appetites in Four Girls at Cottage City, Malinda Russell’s Domestic Cook Book, and Southern Soufflé

Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins’ novel Four Girls at Cottage City, Malinda Russell’s Domestic Cook Book: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen, and Erika Council’s food blog Southern Soufflé are texts that differ in form, genre, purpose, and period. Read together, however, these works construct a narrative of black women’s relationship to food in United States culture. The novel, cookbook, and blog all ask: What does it mean for black women to prepare dishes for themselves and for others? What additional significance does gustatory pleasure and appetite assume for black women? To answer these questions, all three texts must resist an embodied racial logic that seeks to uncover race from the body as an objective truth.

Kelley-Hawkins’, Russell’s, and Council’s texts navigate a spectrum of appetite and satisfaction. Cherene Sherrard-Johnson identifies scenes of consumption in Four Girls at Cottage City as sites of radical pleasure enjoyed among women and having political impact. These moments of pleasurable consumption in Four Girls are in tension with Kyla Wazana Tompkins understanding of “queer alimentarity” in the nineteenth century and its implications for racial relations in the U.S. Understanding how that tension operates within Kelley-Hawkins’ novel informs a reading of Russell’s cookbook and Council’s food blog.

Along with orientations toward pleasure and hunger, the three texts share an emphasis on sugar as both as a desired treat and a commodity with a complicated racial and colonial history. Using Sidney Mintz’s historical and anthropological study of sugar across the Atlantic, I argue that moments of sugar consumption in these works are points where racialized identity—as it is understood historically in the U.S.—enters the body, requiring the authors to confront and resist an embodied racial logic that constructs race and appetite as inseparable from each other. 

Reading these three seemingly disparate texts together, informed by critical texts from both food studies and the digital humanities, contributes to an understanding of how racialized logic operates within food culture in the U.S. All three works constitute a narrative in which race identity seeks to attach itself to bodies of color through food, appetite, and pleasure.

Molly Mann is a PhD Candidate at St. John’s University.