
Stirring the Pot : A History of African Cuisine.
Title:
Stirring the Pot : A History of African Cuisine.
Author:
McCann, James C.
ISBN:
9780896804647
Personal Author:
Edition:
1st ed.
Physical Description:
1 online resource (185 pages)
Series:
Africa in World History ; v.120
Africa in World History
Contents:
Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Series Editors' Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction African Cooking and African History -- Part One Basic Ingredients -- One Seasons and Seasonings Africa's Geographic Endowments of the Edible -- Two Staples, Starches, and the Heat of Atlantic Circulation -- Part Two Stirring the National Stew: Food and National Identity in Ethiopia -- Three Taytu's Feast Cuisine and Nation in the New Flower, Ethiopia, 1887 -- Four Stirring a National Dish Ethiopian Cuisine, 1500-2000 -- Part Three Africa's Cooking: Some Common Ground of Culture and of Cuisine -- Five A West African Culinary Grammar -- Six History and Cookery in the Maize Belt and Africa's Maritime World -- Part Four Africa's Global Menu -- Seven Diaspora Cookery Africa, Circulation, and the New World Pot -- Epilogue Some Good Comparative Readings -- Appendix Recipe List -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.
Abstract:
Africa's art of cooking is a key part of its history. All toooften Africa is associated with famine, but in Stirring the Pot,James C. McCann describes how the ingredients, the practices,and the varied tastes of African cuisine comprise a body of historically gendered knowledge practiced and perfected in householdsacross diverse human and ecological landscape. McCannreveals how tastes and culinary practices are integral to the understanding of history and more generally to the new literature on food as social history. Stirring the Pot offers a chronology of African cuisine beginning in the sixteenth century and continuing from Africa's original edible endowments to its globalization. McCann traces cooks' use of new crops, spices, and tastes, including New World imports like maize, hot peppers, cassava, potatoes, tomatoes, and peanuts, as well as plantain, sugarcane, spices, Asian rice, and other ingredients from the Indian Ocean world. He analyzes recipes, not as fixed ahistorical documents,but as lively and living records of historical change in women's knowledge and farmers' experiments. A final chapter describes in sensuous detail the direct connections of African cooking to New Orleans jambalaya, Cuban rice and beans, and the cooking of African Americans' "soul food." Stirring the Pot breaks new ground and makes clear the relationship between food and the culture, history, and national identity of Africans.
Local Note:
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2017. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
Genre:
Electronic Access:
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