Theresa McCulla - University of Chicago Press - 2024
In a new book, Insatiable City: Food and Race in New Orleans, Theresa McCulla gives voice to Louisiana’s black food industry workers whose stories were muted and marginalized by 300 years of racial injustice. (University of Chicago Press, 2024.) McCulla uses her extraordinary skills as an historian and curator to reveal how the enslaved, free people of color, and black Americans created, shaped, and influenced Creole cuisine. In meticulous detail, supported by ten years of research, McCulla also examines how race played a central role in the tourism and trade sectors of the New Orleans economy.
A curator who has worked in both the public and private sectors, McCulla employs a wide range of sources that give breadth and depth to the lives of the people she profiles in her book. Sources such as municipal records, stereographic images, diaries, postcards, travel guides, oral histories, and more bring these people to the present. For example, McCulla tells about the life of William Scott – a free person of color who moved to New Orleans in 1821. Scott operated a fruit store and coffee shop at different locations near the intersection of today’s Canal and Royal Streets during the years 1830 to 1860. McCulla takes her readers on a “tour” of this neighborhood as it existed in the 19th Century. As she writes, “A census of merchants conducted by the city’s treasurer’s office in 1854 enables a detailed reconstruction of the street on which Scott operated…On his left, proceeding from Carondelet to Baronne, he passed the slave dealers at 157 and 159 Gravier, a dime bar–and site of Scott’s coffee shop–at 161 Gravier; slave dealers at 163 Gravier; then a barber, a merchant tailor, a boot–and shoemaker, and another slave dealer at the intersection with Baronne.” McCulla notes that Scott, a free person of color, operated his businesses surrounded by those who trafficked in and profited from the trade of human beings.
Chapter 1 focuses on the locations where the slave exchanges prominently housed the horrors of bondage. McCulla details the construction and rise to prominence of the St. Louis and St. Charles hotels as they became the principal sites for slave auctions. McCulla observes the irony between the luxury the guests enjoyed at these hotels and the barbaric slave auctions that took place elsewhere within these structures. Chapter 2 examines how the enslaved and free people of color navigated their lives and livelihoods within the food industry in the 19th Century. Chapter 3 examines the invention of photography as a tool to document postbellum New Orleans and Louisiana. McCulla presents several images that detail how the sugar industry remained a cruel and inhuman workplace even after the end of slavery. Chapter 4 focuses on the “French” market, begun under Spanish rule, and how this center of commerce was shaped by New Orleans trade and Jim Crow era policies. McCulla writes that the Choctaws had referred to this area as Bulbancha or a “place of many tongues” while later European and American visitors would use the term “Babel” for this area. This chapter also describes the rise of the supermarket as well as the 1934 French Market renovation in response to the community’s desire to “modernize.” Chapter 5 examines how race and racism in the 20th Century continued to erase African Americans from their rightful place in food culture.
The term “Creole” is examined in depth by McCulla. She shows how white society excluded black Americans from the definition of this group thus making Creole cuisine solely a product of white efforts. This appropriation of black expertise is found in the writings of Natalie Scott who published a widely acclaimed cookbook – Mirations and Miracles of Mandy in 1929. (See the HathiTrust for an online version of this book.) The book presented the recipes of Mandy – a stereotyped “domestic” black cook. Mandy was in fact, a fictional character based on a composite of the cooks Scott and her friends employed in their homes. Acclaim and book profits went to Scott, of course, and as McCulla writes, “Scott’s writing declared a sense of ownership that she and her friends felt of the cooks working in their kitchens.”
McCulla’s most poignant passages demonstrate her compassion for the people who were never able to record their stories . McCulla uses a murder mystery published in 1948 to illustrate her point. In Dinner at Antoine’s by Francis Parkinson Keyes, one of the main characters waxes poetically about Jackson Square as she sips her coffee at Café Du Monde. As the character Ruth says, “This Café Du Monde couldn’t be anywhere except New Orleans…the square itself must look exactly the same tonight as it did a hundred years ago…I could imagine all sorts of ghosts wandering around, under the palm trees.” In response, McCulla writes, “The ghosts that Ruth could not see, wandering under the palm trees, may have whispered in tongues that she could not understand. In the century before she sat at Café du Monde, the history of the place around her had become a story told by a chorus of voices – travel writers, city residents, politicians, newspaper reporters–but not the voices of those who had made the marketplace Bulbancha or Babel.” McCulla, and like-minded writers, have brought some of these voices back to us through their work. Their voices are still there in the squares, sidewalks, and streets of New Orleans. We need only listen.
For other treatments of structural racism in New Orleans and Louisiana see:
Stern, Walter. Race and Education in New Orleans: Creating the Segregated City, 1764-1960. United States: LSU Press, 2018
Horowitz, Andy. Horowitz, Andrew Deutsch. Katrina: A History, 1915–2015. United Kingdom: Harvard University Press, 2020
McQueeney, Kevin. A City Without Care: 300 Years of Racism, Health Disparities, and Health Care Activism in New Orleans. United States: University of North Carolina Press, 2023