Category Archives: Women and Gender

“Like the Genuine Moca”: Ersatz Coffee and Confederate Nationalism during the American Civil War

By Anne Sarah Rubin

Coffee, I must have coffee,
and if anyone wants to give me a treat,
ah!, just give me some coffee!

Although written by J.S. Bach and the librettist Picander in the 1730s, the Coffee Cantata’s homage to the world’s favorite stimulant certainly rang true in the Civil War South. Recipes for coffee substitutes pepper the pages of Confederate newspapers and reminiscences. Elite white women wrote down their personal formulas and debated the virtues of one concoction over another, while scientists weighed in on the chemical composition of different tinctures. Coffee, because it was entirely imported, was one of the first commodities affected by the Union blockade of Southern ports.[i] Doing without coffee, or cheerfully drinking an ersatz variety, became a symbol of patriotic sacrifice, like wearing homespun or a palmetto hat.

“Good Coffee Sweet Potatoes” reads the heading handwritten on the back of a Confederate $100 bond. We can imagine the writer, probably Martha Gourdin DeSaussure, at her home in Charleston during the war, following the steps she carefully enumerated. More likely it was one of the three Black women the DeSaussures enslaved who did the work: first peeling the sweet potatoes, and slicing them into strips, 3/8 or ½ inch thick, then cutting the strips “into squares so as to average the same size.” The squares then had to “dry in the sun three days,” before they could be bagged up. The final step was to “parch a good brown, grind and make as you would coffee berry.”[ii]

A group of Black freedpeople stand, with hoes, over a field of sweet potatoes. Another group sits on the ground beside them, sorting the crop.
Fig. 1. Freedpeople planting sweet potatoes on the Hopkinson plantation, Edisto Island, SC, April, 1862. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2010651644/

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In fact, Confederates turned to almost anything that could be burned, ground, and steeped to make a bitter brown liquid. Some, like rye or chicory are still used today; others, like okra seed, acorns, cotton seeds, or sorghum fell by the wayside after the war. Each had their champion. “To see the earnest face with which each lady discussed her own particular mixture, and her great delight when some courteous old gentleman smacked his lips, and declared, he ‘had not tasted anything so like the genuine moca [sic.] for years, Madam,’ was most edifying,” recalled one Confederate matron.[iii]

An etching depicts a white woman in voluminous dress kneeling and praying in an outfitted cave
Fig. 2. This depiction of a white Southern woman living in a cave during the siege of Vicksburg prominently displays her coffeepot, a touch of home in uncomfortable surroundings. Adalbert John Volck, “Cave Life in Vicksburg,” in Confederate War Etchings, Creative Commons image from The Metropolitan Museum of Art https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/421364

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Of course, people could simply have done without. No one ever died for lack of coffee, and the vegetable and grain varieties all lacked caffeine, so they didn’t provide much physical stimulation. In fact, one advocate for acorn coffee noted that he no longer suffered from headaches, not realizing that he was no longer suffering from daily caffeine withdrawal.[iv] Psychologically, though, there was something to the ritual of drinking something hot, brown, and slightly bitter. It represented a moment of normalcy, a chance to offer some hospitality, to warm up, to momentarily forget one’s troubles.

When the war ended, coffee returned to the South. Freedmen’s Bureau and US Army rations (distributed to both Black and white Southerners in the months after the war) sometimes contained rye coffee.[v] Southern cookbooks published after the war trafficked heavily in nostalgia for antebellum abundance and rarely mentioned harder times. Maria Massey Barringer did include a recipe for Blockade Coffee (made of rye) in her 1867 Dixie Cookery, billed as “a practical cook-book for southern housekeepers,” but few other regionalists did the same.[vi] In fact, Mrs. Porter’s New Southern Cookery Book tartly noted that “those who are not particular as to quality, but only want something that looks like coffee” could try “roasted acorns, chick peas, beans, rye, cocoa shells, burned wheat bread, dried and roasted turnip, carrot and dandelion root,” but pointedly did not recommend any of them.[vii] Mentions of ersatz coffee became staples of nostalgic reminiscences, about hardships overcome without interrogating real struggles and hunger. They were given with almost a wink and a laugh—suffering for coffee was funny, actual starvation was not.

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[i] Mary Elizabeth Massey, Ersatz in the Confederacy: Shortages and Substitutes on the Southern Homefront, Southern Classics Series (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 72-73. Andrew F. Smith, Starving the South: How the North Won the Civil War, 1st ed (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011), 14.

[ii] The receipt book was donated to the Museum of the Confederacy by Martha Gourdin DeSaussure, the wife of South Carolina Brigadier General Wilmot Gibbs DeSaussure. It appears to have been compiled sometime after the Civil War. Frances M. Burroughs, “The Confederate Receipt Book: A Study of Food Substitution in the American Civil War,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine 93, no. 1 (n.d.): 31–50. The recipe is on p.6 of the book, pp 44-45 in the article. The number of enslaved people is from the 1860 slave census. Porcher describes sweet potato coffee as “used on several plantations in lower Carolina.” Resources of the Southern Fields and Forests, 400.

[iii] “What the Confederates Ate,” by Clara Minor Lynn VHS, 2.

[iv] [No Title], Arkansas True Democrat, January 9, 1862.

[v] Orders for Rations Issued, 1865, Governor Sharkey, Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

[vi] Barringer, Dixie Cookery; or, How I Managed My Table for Twelve Years. A Practical Cook-Book for Southern Housekeepers (Boston, 1867), 108.

[vii] M. E. Porter, Mrs. Porter’s New Southern Cookery Book and Companion for Frugal and Economical Housekeepers (John E. Potter & Company, 1871), 379.

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Anne Sarah Rubin is a Professor of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where she was the 2016-2017 Lipitz Professor of the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. She was also the Associate Director of the Imaging Research Center from 2017-2020. Her most recent book is the co-edited memoir, The Perfect Scout: A Soldier’s Memoir of the Great March to the Sea and the Campaign of the Carolinas (University of Alabama Press, 2018). Dr. Rubin’s first book, A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy (UNC, 2005), received the 2006 Avery O. Craven Award from the Organization of American Historians, for the most original book on the Civil War era. Her study of the place of Sherman’s March in American culture and history, entitled Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman’s March in American Memory was published in September 2014 by UNC Press. The project also has a multimedia component, which can be found at http://www.shermansmarch.org. She is currently working on a project called A Mouthful of Nothing: Food and Famine in the Civil War South, 1860-1868.

Intimate Experiences: War and Food in Lee Miller

By Karina Elizabeth Vázquez

There are only a few steps between my living room and kitchen, so a section of the library stands directly opposite to a countertop stacked with cookbooks. It wasn’t until I began to think about what to write about Lee Miller (1907-1977), her work as a war correspondent, battlefield photographer, and her relationship with gastronomy, that I realized that two books sit opposite one another, one in the library and one in the kitchen: The Unwomanly Face of War (2017) by Svetlana Alexievich and Lee Miller: A Life with Food, Friends & Recipes (2017) by Miller’s granddaughter Ami Bouhassane. The texts engage in a necessary dialogue between what is expressed in testimonies from women of the Russian army collected by Alexievich and what is present in the lives of Lee Miller, the surrealist muse and photographer, the war correspondent for Vogue, and the brilliant chef. War is an extremely intimate experience, says Alexievich, and in their testimonies, women who participated in the war speak about what happened and didn’t happen to their bodies. During the war they didn’t feel like women; upon returning, their bodies had become dead, they had lost their menstruation, they had to deal with the scars, and they felt no desire. The burden of rebuilding daily life, following gender mandates, forced them to silence the trauma of that violent experience. What did Lee Miller feel in her body during the war? She too experienced silence. Upon returning from the war, she filed all her photographic material in the attic (rediscovered by her son, Anthony Penrose, only after her death in 1977). She instead found in the intimacy of the kitchen, in culinary creativity, a healing mechanism.

An overhead view of a history and photography book laying on a kitchen counter
Fig. 1.  A view of the author’s kitchen/library, courtesy of the author.

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Biographers and critics have pointed out that Miller led several lives: as a model and surrealist artist of the 1920s and 1930s, a fashion photographer of the late 1930s, a war correspondent and combat photographer from 1944 to 1946, and a creative chef from the postwar years until her death. Miller’s photography and culinary art are not separate and share a common spirit. There is a continuity between the surrealism of her early years, her experience at the front—where, as photojournalist David E. Scherman has noted, she used her culinary skills and knowledge to search for non-perishable foods and herbs to add flavor to rations and cooking stews in helmets—and the imagination and attention to detail of her later cooking.

Bright recipe and photography books lay open across a kitchen counter
Fig. 2. An alternate view of the author’s kitchen/library, courtesy of the author.

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Two images that have the body as a common component come to mind when I think about the relationship between war and food in Lee Miller’s work. The first is the photograph Severed Breasts From Radical Surgery In A Place Setting, from 1929, where the luminosity of her lens captures the violence inflicted on the female body by showing a removed breast served on a plate, ready to be eaten. The image denounces beauty standards, medical discourse, and eating norms, which coalescence as if they were simultaneously a scalpel and a utensil that intensely intervene in the female body and feelings. It’s clear that, even in her time as Man Ray’s muse and fashion photographer, Miller was a correspondent in another war and a photographer on another battlefield.

The transformation of everyday life imposed by the world of war on women’s lives and bodies appeared through Lee’s lens in critical montages that indicate the same thing as the testimonies collected by Alexievich: for women, above all, war is murder and, furthermore, a hard daily labor in which feeding themselves and caring for others occupies most of the time and space that survives the violence. I think of “Homeless: Like The Women Of German-Invaded Countries, German Women Now Cook In The Ruins”, a photograph taken in Nuremberg in 1945. Cooking is an act that never occurs in a vacuum, even when it is the result of the violent destruction of the meaning that, for better or worse, orders our hours and days.

The second image is the recipe for “Cauliflower Breast,” which appears in one of the photographs accompanying the article “How to Make an Art of the Happy Weekend. The Personal Strategy and Beautiful Food of Lee Penrose,” by Bettina McNulty, published in House & Gardens in 1973 (and reproduced in Bouhassane’s book) under the title “Cauliflower Mayonnaise.” As Bouhassane points out, this time the breasts are served by invitation only, a clear indication that Miller is positioned differently than in that 1929 image: equally critical, but probably more tired and, as a result of that tiredness, willing to create differently. I visualize Lee Miller in her kitchen, imaginatively searching for opportunities to counter what her camera captured at Buchenwald. Cooking is also a form of remembrance; dishes can become memories. Once again, I turn to Svetlana Alexievich.For her, memories are not impassive narratives of the past, but creative acts that allow us to rewrite our lives. And I can see Miller, with her recipe books, concocting something simple and disruptive like an “Onion Upside-Down Cake, and later on, as Bouhassane recalls, laughing and disappointed after winning a culinary contest that had a bag of onions as a prize. Her relationship with the culinary world, before, during, and after the war, was a way of being present, of relocating herself as a mechanism of resistance.

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Karina Vázquez (Ph.D., University of Florida) teaches and researches Latin American literature, and cultures, visual studies, and critical pedagogy. She the Director of Community-Based Learning (CBL) in the Department of Latina American, Latino & Iberian Studies at the University of Richmond. Her teaching specializations include Spanish language and seminars on work and gender, food and culture, and graphic novels. In 2023, Dr. Vázquez co-curated the exhibition Jay Lynn Gomez: Domestic Scenes Reconsidered / Jay Lynn Gomez: Otra mirada sobre lo doméstico at the Joel and Lila Harnett Museum at the University of Richmond. Some of her publications on Latin American literature and culture, literary and visual representations of work, CBL, and food studies can be accessed through https://scholarship.richmond.edu/lalis/.

Remembering Francisco Solano López’s Foodways in Paraguay

By Bridget María Chesterton   

Map highlighting the territorial disputes of the War of the Triple Alliance
Map highlighting the territorial disputes of the War of the Triple Alliance. By Hoodinski, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The defeat of Paraguay by its powerful neighbors, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, during the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870) left the country in ruins. The complex causes of the war can be boiled down to the fact that Paraguayans sought to limit the growing power and influence of Brazil in Uruguay’s politics and economics. As Paraguayans held off their enemies over a number of years, the Paraguayan military and population was forced to feed itself on nothing more than oranges, manioca (yucca), and the occasional emaciated cow. It was a military and a country on a forced starvation diet.

The President and dictator of Paraguay, Francisco Solano López (popularly known by his military title “el Mariscal”), had led his country into this disastrous conflagration that left more than 90% of the male population dead from battlefield injuries and disease, but mostly from starvation. Struggling to understand Paraguay’s defeat in war, post-war intellectuals were quick to blame Solano López. However, by the 1930s, narratives about the war were changing. A new Liberal elite born after the war began to remember Solano López as a “hero” who saved the country from being totally dismembered by the allies. This stemmed from the logic that, while the country was certainly defeated in the war, it—and its people—remained.    

These new national narratives took many forms, including recipes. In 1931, Raquel Livieres de Artecona published the first Paraguayan cookbook. She stated in the introduction that it was written in the new “nationalist orientation [for] public education.” [i] For Livieres, the primary purpose of her book was to educate Paraguayan students about their glorious culinary past.

Newspaper article featuring picture of Raquel Liveres de Artecona.
Fig. 2. Image of Raquel Liveres de Artecona, in the public domain.

These recollections and recipes—based on the oral testimonies of women who remembered the war—proved to be powerful reminders of the importance of culinary survival after a devastating defeat.[ii] As an oral historian, Livieres recorded the memories of female survivors and their recipes. Not only did she collect the recipes, but she also named each individual woman who contributed to her collection. While it is impossible to tell where in Paraguay many of these women lived, it is most likely that the majority of the women lived in and around Asunción and were both white and elite, like Livieres. Even though not all Paraguayan women were included in this tome, some of the war’s survivors are remembered and also acknowledged and given a place in the broader history of Paraguay. By preserving these voices, not only had the country and its women survived the war, but its food traditions had also made survival possible. It was fundamental, then, to honor the past with foods that were beloved by the nation’s most important war hero, el Mariscal.

Livieres’ book, one of the few works written by a woman in the Liberal era (1904-1936), highlights the “heroic” food choices of el Mariscal.[iii] Written at the height of Liberal era politics in Paraguay and immediately following the broad educational reform in 1925 that refocused education in Paraguay along nationalistic lines, the text aligns with the new educational plan developed in the country.[iv] The cookbook was designed to be used in public schools in home economics courses throughout the nation and as a result found a wide audience among female Paraguayan students. As noted by the famed Paraguayan Liberal-era writer and intellectual Manuel Domínguez in the prologue of the cookbook, the book highlights “how our forefathers fed themselves” and thus “was one of the reasons, tested in war, behind their nutritive strength.”[v] During the Liberal era, Paraguayan food memory thus became a place where Paraguayans could take pride in their nation. 

Exploiting ideas of historical revisionism surrounding Solano Lopez, certain recipes in the cookbook were highlighted as “preferences” of the newly minted hero of the war and of Paraguay more generally. Writing that “a cream cake” and a “tomato jelly” were favorites of el Mariscal, Livieres taps into a clearly patriotic national narrative and a shared food recollection that honors the memory of Solano López.

A Spanish version of Livieres de Artecona's recipe for Tomato Jelly with Wedges
Fig. 3. Image used with permission of the owner, Carlos Vera Abed.

An English translation of Livieres de Artecona's recipe for Tomato Jelly with WedgesThrough this text, teaching women about the recipes from their nation’s history was a way to build the country’s heroic past for new generations born after the war. Thus, the text serves as a foundational intellectual work for the new Liberal era in Paraguay. Acknowledging Liveres as an intellectual in her own right gives women a place in the making of a new Paraguay.

 


 

[i] Raquel Livieres de Artecona, La Cocinera Paraguay (Asunción: La Colmena S.A. 1931), np.

[ii] Livieres de Artecona, La Cocinera Paraguay, 10.

[iii] For more on the remaking of Solano López as a national hero, see Bridget Maria Chesterton, The Grandchildren of Solano López: Frontier and Nation in Paraguay (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013).

[iv] David Velázquez Seiferheld, “’Desratizar la enseñanza es una tarea auténticamente nacionalista…’: La polémica sobre el nacionalismo y la Escuela Nueva. (1925-1941),” Historia de la educación – anuario 16 no. 2 (December 2015).

[v] Manuel Domínguez, “Prolog,” in Raquel Livieres de Artecona, La Cocinera Paraguay (Asunción: La Colmena S.A., 1931), np.

 


Bridget María Chesterton is Professor of History at Buffalo State University where she teaches Latin American History and Commodities Histories. Her current book project is entitled Hotel Guaraní: The Brazilianization of the Paraguayan Middle Class during the Stroessner Era and is currently under contract with the University of Pittsburgh Press. She has also published in Food and Global History, Journal of Women’s History, Hispanic American Historical Review, and Journal of Social History among others. Her email is chestebm@buffalostate.edu.

“Pain au Levain”: Reproductive Rights, Recipes, and Community Cookbooks

By KC Hysmith, PhD
Packaged in a brown paper and cellophane fold-over bag, not unlike those you’d find at your corner bakery or at the farmers’ market, the Beaux “Bread Bag” contains a hefty stack of paper printed with information about reproductive rights and health care access. Activists gather in-person around a table to share this knowledge, much of it word-of-mouth, and then work together to print, cut, fold, and assemble each bread bag specific to the needs of individual states–including Wisconsin, Kentucky, Georgia, Illinois, and North Carolina–whose governments have severely restricted or completely banned numerous essential reproductive health care procedures.

Activists packing up bread bags. Image Credit: Borealis
Sourdough loaves stenciled with phrases about abortion access. These loaves were photographed and then printed as ephemera in the bread bags. Image Credit: Borealis

Numerous scholars agree that recipes are a type of feminist discourse, and a “particularly feminine way of knowing and sharing knowledge.”[1]  Importantly, these crowd-sourced books also helped to spread information to other women, at times subversively and at others loudly. As Carrie Helms Tippen explains, “Recipes, and by extension cookbooks, are narratives that focus on silenced women and challenge phallocentric methods of writing history.”[2] It stands to reason, this rewriting also serves to create safer spaces for the sharing of other women-centered knowledge, including information related to reproductive health.

For many generations, reproductive health has been both an incredibly personal topic and      socially taboo subject. There are likely countless “recipes” for abortions in addition to instructions for providing post-procedure nourishment and care tucked away in unpublished manuscripts and personal correspondence – two historically important forms of media used by women to share food knowledge. Before the technological advancements of modern gynecology, when reproductive healthcare carried different political implications, women passed information to one another. This information frequently took the form of a recipe and used ingredients women often grew at home or that grew nearby. argues that women often collected and shared recipes based on herbal medicinal traditions of the time period and “were expected to have general medical knowledge in order to fulfill their Christian duties as wives, mothers, and caregivers, both within the home and the community.” [3]

Centuries later, despite advancements in printing technologies and progress for women’s political agency, the knowledge of reproductive care recipes continues to be shared using subversive and community-aligned methods such as zines, ephemeral pamphlets, and booklets. After the increasing threats to abortion access levied by the Trump Administration starting in 2016, and then the 2022 reversal of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court, resulting in no constitutional protection of abortion access, activists across the nation published updated or reprinted reproductive care “cookbooks.”

The recipe format serves as both a commonly-known narrative device and a respected method of knowledge sharing amongst women. Modern reproductive care texts tend to feature one or a combination of “recipes” for at-home abortions using specific emmenagogue herbs or medicines, including mifepristone and misoprostol, in addition to more traditional recipes and meal guides for providing nourishment and care for those who have experienced an abortion. Zines including “Grow Your Abortion: Herbs to Make You Bleed” (published by Holistic Abortions) and “Reclaiming Our Ancient Wisdom: Herbal Abortion Procedure and Practice for Midwives and Herbalists” by Catherine Marie Jeunet include herbal recipes as well as short historical overviews of herbal abortifacient histories. The second issue of Wildseed Feminism focuses on herbal remedies “for Lifelong Reproductive Care” and includes recipes to manage “uncomfortable symptoms relating to PMS, periods, pregnancy, and perimenopause.”

Cover of Reclaiming Our Ancient Wisdom. Image Credit: Microcosm Publishing
Cover of Cooking Up Trouble. Image Credit: Leela Cyd and Anne Parker

Using a combination of community knowledge sharing with fundraising, the Breadbox project, founded by social activist artist Borealis, “averts high tech surveillance through a multi-modal constellation of access points.” And much like other recipe collections, “no two installations, video presentations, bread bags, or conversations associated with this project are exactly the same; the project travels and evolves as social conditions require.” Each bag includes a small pile of ephemera, so similar to the small recipe leaflets that once accompanied early 20th century appliances and popular grocery store ingredients, with state-specific reproductive health care information, all-options phone numbers, colorful zines, and lists of action-items for supporting abortion access. One zine entitled “Medication Abortion” ends with a short section on “support” advising readers to consider “making food in advance (soups, broths, warm & easy to digest, simple snacks)” or asking someone else to cook for them.

The back of the North Carolina bread bag. Image Credit: Borealis

A larger booklet entitled pain au levain: safety, comfort, & expectations during pregnancy release, artfully riso-printed in hot pink and brown, features a section on creating a care plan with the “universal things people need when they are bleeding through menstruation, miscarriage, or abortion: nutrition, rest, warmth, and community.” The booklet’s title is a play on the French phrase for sourdough (pain au levain) and the normal, but painful side effects of the abortion process. An additional layer of meaning to the phrase, refers to the painstaking process women face to access basic reproductive care in modern day America.

Much like any other community cookbook old or new, these reproductive health care texts continue the practice of supporting a network of women with resources, respect, and acknowledgement. The recipes serve a different purpose than a gifted baked good or a weeknight casserole; instead, they exist as an integral political medium of knowledge sharing and community in the precarious reproductive health care landscape of contemporary America. As the bright yellow tag on the Bread Bag reads: “We share our resources for the common good.”

[1] Carrie Helms Tippen, “Writing Recipes, Telling Histories: Cookbooks as Feminist Historiography,” in Food, Feminisms, Rhetorics, edited by Melissa A. Goldthwaite, 18.

[2] Tippen, “Writing Recipes, Telling Histories,” 18.

[3] Ashley Buchanan, “Dittany: Women’s Herbs and Reproductive Control,” Plant Humanities Lab, JSTOR, https://lab.plant-humanities.org/Dittany/.

REFERENCES:

Borealis. pain au levain: safety, comfort, & expectations during pregnancy release. (self-pub.,  2022).

Borealis. Bread Box Project. https://beaux.studio/breadbox.

Buchanan, Ashley. “Dittany: Women’s Herbs and Reproductive Control.” Plant Humanities Lab, JSTOR, https://lab.plant-humanities.org/Dittany/.

Cyd, Leela and Anne Parker. Cooking Up Trouble: Recipes to Nourish Women  (self-pub.,  2016).

Helms Tippen, Carrie. “Writing Recipes, Telling Histories: Cookbooks as Feminist Historiography,” in Food, Feminisms, Rhetorics, edited by Melissa A. Goldthwaite, 15-29. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017.

Holistic Abortions. “Grow Your Abortion: Herbs to Make You Bleed.” Red Hook Collective, 2021.

Jeunet, Catherine Marie. “Reclaiming Our Ancient Wisdom: Herbal Abortion Procedure and Practice for Midwives and Herbalists.” Eberhardt Press, 2009 (reprinted through 2019).

Dr. KC Hysmith is a writer, food scholar, and historical recipe developer. She holds an MLA in Gastronomy from Boston University and PhD in American Studies focusing on food and culture from the University of North Carolina. Her dissertation, “#FOODHERSTORY: Food and American Women’s Political Resistance from Suffrage to the Digital Age,” investigated the legacy and power of women’s food history. She is the editor and co-editor of Edible North Carolina (UNC Press 2022), An American Girl Anthology (University Press of Mississippi, forthcoming), and When Southern Women Cook (America’s Test Kitchen, forthcoming). Find more of her work on TikTok (@foodherstory) and on Instagram (@kchysmith). Find more of her work here: https://www.kchysmith.com/