Scholar Dr. Rafia Zafar’s work explores the centrality of African Americans to U.S. culinary culture. Her book Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning highlights the significant role of food culture in African American writing over a century and more; meals cooked and eaten illustrate the literary and entrepreneurial strategies wielded on behalf of Black civil rights, social mobility and respectability. This talk will focus on a particular aspect of those “recipes for respect”: how cookbooks tell a nuanced tale about African American culinary history.
This event is in part to highlight the Peter D. Franklin Cookbook Collection, which contains more than 8,000 volumes. We currently have a display on the first floor of Thompson Library of African American cookbooks from this collection, which will be up through early December.
For more information about Dr. Zafar's work, visit: https://sites.wustl.edu/zafar/.
