Lettie Gay, "Two Hundred Years of Charleston Cooking" ( U South Carolina Press, 2021)

Southern Food Historian Rebecca Sharpless discusses a new edition of Two Hundred Years of Charleston Cooking released in 2021 by University of South Carolina Press. Sharpless added a new critical introduction to the historic cookbook, first published in 1930 from a New York press as a collaboration between Blanche Rhett, Helen Woodward, and Lettie Gay. Woodward had married into a family with South Carolina ties and for a time rented a home that shared a courtyard with Rhett. As Woodward tells the story, she wanted to send some recipes back to her Northern connections, and Rhett suggested she write a book of recipes instead. Gay tested the recipes in a New York kitchen, standardizing measurements and translating them to a wider audience. Sharpless immediately foregrounds the Northern sensibility that informs the rhetorical situation of the book. Published just a few years before Gone With the Wind, the cookbook represented a version of Charleston’s sumptuous antebellum past to an audience with an appetite for consuming moonlight and magnolias. Sharpless’s 2021 introduction asks the question, “What do readers today need to know to put the book in context?” Sharpless uses most of the limited space of the foreword acknowledging the uncredited contributors to the cookbook and offering more information about those named in the book. Sharpless is especially – and rightly – critical of the ways that Two Hundred Years erases the contributions of enslaved people, and when it does offer credit, it is usually demeaning and patronizing in its depictions of African American domestic cooks as “magical” and unscientific. Sharpless reminds today’s readers that “It is a book of white nostalgia, not black.” And the final words of the foreword could not be any clearer: “Two Hundred Years of Charleston Cooking stands as a double monument: to the rich foodways of the Lowcountry and the efforts of White Charlestonians to put a pretty face on White Supremacy.” With this caveat, Sharpless does acknowledge some extraordinary women from Ch