It’ Paula’s World!”: Paula Deen, Race, and Southern Kitchens and Cookery

 

 

 

Whitten Overby, wo44@cornell.edu

Ph.D. Program, History of Architecture and Urban Development

 

 

In a 2014 reality television show entitled Paula’s World produced for her recent online network, celebrity chef Paula Deen agrees with her son, Bobby Deen, that hers is a great American success story.[1] Paula, Bobby, and Bobby’s new wife, Claudia, stand in the kitchen of a Savannah, Georgia Best Western where her first restaurant, the Lady, was located and reflect upon Paula’s ascent to national prominence. This kitchen was the second in a string of kitchens-as-workspaces in which Paula made her name cooking Southern comfort food, a regional cuisine largely descended from former black slave traditions and, later, poor black Southern sharecroppers; Deen problematically labels this food tradition Southern plantation cuisine.[2] Paula Deen rose from running a lunchtime meal delivery service called the Bag Lady out of her cracker-box Savannah home’s cramped kitchen in 1989 to, at the peak of her fame in the late 2000s, managing a restaurant, writing and promoting a series of cookbooks, and hosting three shows on the American basic cable television channel the Food Network. It is within her kitchens that Deen reveals how conflating domestic food labor with leisure and pleasure lulls one into historical amnesia regarding regional traumas.

 

Dogwood, Paula’s home where she filmed Paula’s Home Cooking (from 2005-2013), Paula’s Best Dishes (2008-2013), and now her Paula Deen Network cooking content, is the iconic Paula Deen kitchen, rustic but opulent (Figures 1 and 2).[3]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

White cabinets abut a black granite sink with workspaces, or countertops, on either side and an open, doublewide stove top behind which many pans are hung against an exposed stone wall; there’s brick next to the stone, giving the home the sense of having been constructed during different historic periods. The kitchen is, above all, a single, open room with plenty of counter space and a second stove top on the central island where Deen and her frequent guests prepare their Southern recipes, but the space also suggests flexibility—that, when not amidst filming, it could function as a large social gathering space while Paula prepares a meal. Paula Deen describes the kitchen as the locus of the Southern home in addition to defining the simple ways Southerners act in those spaces. Furthermore, she details food as a means of constructing kinship, or familial and friendly, relations with other Southerners:

 

                     In my neck of the woods, food connects us to others. For some reason, at almost                          every party, everyone usually congregates in the kitchen. In the South, people                                spend a whole lot of time in the kitchen sharing recipes, passing down traditions.                          Food brings everyone to the table…in the South, you have your mashed potatoes                            and your butter beans and your fried chicken, and you’re not talking about the                                food or the politics—it’s all about coming together to have a conversation about                              your day, and, by the way, to eat mighty good[4]

 

Yet, in a 2011 appearance on the syndicated American televangelical show The 700 Club to promote her cookbook Paula Deen’s Southern Cooking Bible, Paula challenges postwar America’s idealization of the domestic female laborer. Gordon Robertson, the host, tells Deen that she’s one of his heroes and goads her into her creation myth, which she presents as abstracted spiritual narrative:

 

                     I’m a product of the sixties, y’all, where it was alright for the man to take care of                            ya. Um, and you just do your wifely duties, you know, the house, the kids, the                                 cookin’, the cleanin’, and finally one day I realized that I need to make a change,                             that things definitely needed to change and I took responsibility for myself on that                         day and God has not missed one day blessing me for that[5]

 

Deen is, of course, referring to the Bag Lady, inverting the notion of “wifely duties” and turning the idea of private domestic labor into the production and sale of public commodities. She unravels Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, that precious 1950s rendering of the woman almost a commodity for men and at best an idle consumer wasting her potential, while also upending political theory’s belief in the privatization of work, and the concomitant ideology that both the household and the workplace are private spaces, by inviting public television cameras and viewers into her private kitchens.[6] When she was running the Bag Lady out of her kitchen, Deen lacked the proper counter space to prepare her packaged lunches and had to make ad-hoc daily renovations using a piece of plywood placed on top of her stove. Redesigning prefabricated domestic workspaces in order to render them sites of productivity represents the conscious rejection of first and second wave feminisms’ interpretation of the house and the kitchen as spaces of unpaid (read: domestic) idle labor and office and factory spaces as those of paid labor and ingenuity; by renovating, Deen re-inscribes spaces of domestic work as those of a waged labor that suits her needs and exceeds cynical asides made by Betty Friedan like “home sewing became a million-dollar industry.”[7]

 

Paula Deen and her fan base are characterized by the abnegation of the spatial histories associated with female domestic work, but Deen also riotously, unintentionally, and publicly revealed Southern food’s complex racial culinary history by throwing around the term “nigger” among employees at her Savannah restaurant Uncle Bubba’s Seafood and Oyster House in 2013.  Deen supposedly, said that “I want a true southern plantation-style wedding…what I would really like is a bunch of little niggers to wear long-sleeve white shirts, black jackets and bow ties, you [like how in] know in the Shirley Temple days they used to tap dance around.”[8] In the aftershock of this information emerging, Deen was publicly shamed on the NBC morning talk show Today in 2013[9], breaking down into tears and admitting her mistakes, only to be twice roasted by the feminist daytime talk show hosts on The View while the popular press from The New Yorker to local Savannah papers condemned her invocation of a bygone racial imaginary. She has not learned from her missteps, either: in a 2014 interview with the Huffington Post she openly admitted that she did not know about her chosen cuisine’s history, racial or otherwise, any further back than her grandmother’s recipes.[10]

 

I do not seek to ignore Deen’s mistakes or the racist ideologies undergirding them, but, as a melodramatically bored Oprah candidly put it in an Extra interview, “she’s not the first white woman to use the N word,” gesturing at the wider social problem undergirding white America’s protracted appropriation of Southern cuisine as well as Deen’s personal confusion regarding the cuisine’s complicated racialized class formations.[11] America’s largest regional lifestyle magazine Southern Living, published monthly since 1966, has over the course of its run taken the cuisine of the region’s poor black residents and rendered it a desirable commodity for its affluent white ones. As Dianne Harris posits about the immediate postwar era, it is the implicit trans-media promotion of ideals that enforces racialized and gendered hierarchies.[12] While Paula Deen has only received one full-length article in Southern Living, the magazine preempted then worked alongside Deen to rewrite the history of Southern cuisine.

 

Southern Living primarily consists of pornographic architectural interiors and foodstuffs: its covers usually feature a new take on a regional favorite like Creole shrimp, presented in a staged, sumptuous fashion, while, beyond providing recipes for similar meals, its articles address concerns of the nuclear, heteronormative family largely through articles concerning kitchen design. Articles by, based upon headshots from their website, an almost entirely white writing staff address upper middle class readers with articles like “Making a Kitchen Work,” “New Kitchen, Timeless Charm,” “Two Work Areas in One Small Kitchen,” a series called “Smart Solutions for the Kitchen,” “A Dream Kitchen,” “Kitchen Offices,” “Kitchen for Family Living,” and “Living in the Kitchen.” Modernized Southern plantation-style interior elements dominate the photo spreads that accompany the brief articles, with chandeliers, carved cabinetry, islands, exposed brick, checkered flooring, and tiling recombining. It is in the spatial openness, rustic detailing, and their peripheral placement within an open floor plan that these kitchens resemble those of plantations because, most frequently, plantation kitchens and smoke houses (used for the South’s most popular meat, pork) existed as separate buildings apart from the main plantation home. As folklorist John Vlach, memoirist Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin, and historian Marcie Cohen Ferris demonstrate, productive and consumptive food spaces were divided along racialized property lines: slaves worked the productive spaces, stand-alone buildings that removed foul smells, heat, the risk of fire, and black bodies, from the proper plantation home where owner’s dining rooms were located.[13] John Vlach argues this separation solidified social boundaries between slaves and their owners but kept female slave cooks close enough to the plantation home for the female of the house to oversee them and to distribute foodstuff as necessary.[14]

 

Plantation kitchens usually consisted of either an expansive, single room building with a fireplace (what would become an stove top) to one end or two rooms with fireplaces either in the center connecting the rooms or at both ends of the roof. In the latter plan, the kitchen doubled as slaves’ quarters for the cook staff, a typological precedent for the common modern Southern kitchen’s coextension into the ‘family room,’ a postwar spatial invention intended for all-purpose familial rest-and-relaxation. There is, moreover, a striking resemblance between Hollywood’s recreation of black Southern plantation kitchens and the modern Southern white kitchen. In the 1946 Disney production Song of the South, Hattie McDaniel, best known for her Oscar-winning turn as, yes, Mammy in Gone with the Wind, sings “Sooner or Later” in such a kitchen.[15] As McDaniel sings in anticipation of the film’s stereotyped Uncle Remus character “sooner or later wantin’ my cookin’ again,” she prepares a pie—likely the common Southern chicken pie chocked full of ham, potatoes, chicken, peas, beets, and onions[16]—on an island table, moving between this table, the fiery stove behind her, and kitchen cabinets with cookware against an adjacent wall (Figure 3).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the exact spatial layout of Paula Deen’s Dogwood as well as of the kitchen of her first show, but, notably, McDaniel’s wearing a checkered dress and an apron. This apron, in which most black “Mammies,” or caretakers, were pictured wearing is outright rejected by Paula Deen on the 700 Club and in her autobiography where she claims the “apron made me look fat” and “told them [her producers that] I was going to drop that apron crap.”[17]

 

Paula Deen’s Dogwood and her new home’s kitchens are located adjacent to full-wall windows and doors looking out onto a garden, creating a suggestive foodway between interior and exterior by connecting two sites of food production, and they exist as part of an expansive open floor plan that subsumes much of her first floor living spaces into the kitchen’s sphere. These kitchens invoke plantation-style food space through their openness as well as in their conflation of two kinds of domestic space. Notably, this trend in modern Southern kitchen design, based upon Southern Living’s back catalog, seems to have begun in the early 1980s when Americans began expanding their neocolonial homes or building entirely new ones. Reconstruction-era Southern homes of those affluent enough to remodel incorporated the kitchen into their homes but usually placed these rooms, as they’d continue to be, at the periphery and quadrated them off in a cramped fashion.[18] The before and after renovation floor plans for a 1901 Montgomery, Alabama “Dream Kitchen” from Southern Living exhibit these changing spatial dynamics (Figure 4).[19]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The small house that Paula Deen ran the Bag Lady out of had an even smaller kitchen than the 1901 Alabama one, with a single counter space adjacent to the oven; her later, self-designed kitchens at Dogwood and her newer private residence, Riverbend, reflect the lessons learned from cramped kitchen quarters. Her estates evoke the nostalgia for Southern plantation living further with their Georgian Revival style, with thick, columnar fronts, wide front and back porches, a thick roof overhanging the front, and symmetrical facades. As a Southern Living article from 1998 proposes, plantation homes and newer plantation-style architectures are “enchanted place[s] in the soft green countryside of southern Georgia” where “yesterdays have yet to retire.”[20] “Welcome to yesterday,” the article declares that the titular plantation façade announces, and the owners, at least in 1998, had opened the home in question up to eager tourists, claiming that “‘we’re pleased to be able to host people and welcome them to this world.’”[21] This is the popular imaginary that people like Paula Deen seek to tap into with their expansive open kitchen designs, even though, as another Southern Living article more honestly and accurately posits, “that image [of an idealized Old South plantation] only exists on celluloid.”[22] Paula Deen’s kitchens translate the filmic into the televisual, the dominant mode of mass visual consumption in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. Southern Living reflects the degree to which television has become integral to daily American lives—“Let’s face it. For most of us, television is a big part of our lives”—by providing many suggestions for how to best situate TVs amidst traditional and modern Southern interiors.[23] It is the distinctly white, upper-middle class market that would have such concerns that Paula appeals to with her programming and with her various tie-in product lines.

 

Like Paula Deen’s family and guests (other than Oprah and her security guard), when Southern Living’s pristine, hygienic spaces include human figures, they are always white, equally clean, and usually a solo, cooking female or a smiling, again white nuclear family gathered around or waiting for the mother-wife to finish her meal preparation. Southern Living represents the American South as other than it is, its cuisine that of wealthy whites that reside in ever-expanding suburban homes. Savannah, for example, has a population that is 55% black with 22% below the poverty line while Atlanta’s population is 54% black with 23% below the poverty line: at least Georgia, where Deen’s recipes and lifestyle brands are based, is predominantly poor and black with a far greater percent of the population below the poverty line compared to national averages. The spatial rhetorics of whiteness in Southern Living’s articles correspond to that of Paula Deen’s shows and lifestyle brand claims. Southern Living tells us that “the kitchen is the heart of almost every home…and needs to be an efficient space for the whole family to enjoy”—even though it’s a the house’s periphery—and advises dividing the kitchen into different workspaces[24]—one on either side of the sink and a third on a large island, like at Dogwood—just as Paula Deen tells viewers of Extreme Makeover that “the kitchen’s definitely the heart of the home”[25] The claim is repeated again and again, by Deen and by Southern Living, the former further elaborating that “the house is almost like our body. You got this big boy in here beatin’ and to me that is the kitchen. In many ways, you’re feeding your soul along with your body,” while the latter suggests that “there’s no question we all live in the kitchen—it’s the hub of the household.”[26]

 

Paula Deen’s modern Southern kitchens are where she experiments with and refines the recipes she presents on air and in her restaurants and later codifies in her cookbooks. Her cookbooks are spatializing products because they not only allude to Paula’s own kitchens at Dogwood and elsewhere but they are also the emplaced products through which one translates her suggestions into their own personal culinary language and, significantly, in their own private kitchens. The recipes included within these cookbooks build upon Southern regional culinary traditions with an emphasis on salted, smoked, and otherwise prepared pork, corn, and syrups, molasses, and other sugars. In the early eighteenth century, English naturalist Mark Catesby noticed in both white settlers and black slaves that corn, either as pone, mush, or hominy, dominated their diets, and he likewise noticed that raising pigs and growing collards were food productivities especially suited for Southern plantations that lacked space for cows to graze and that were in search of a rapidly regenerating vegetable.[27]

 

These staples evolved into the basic diets of African-American slaves by the late eighteenth century, with rations of cornmeal and fatback pork handed out weekly based upon one’s position within the plantation hierarchy. Diarist Fanny Kemble, a northern transplant in the antebellum Lowcountry that Paula Deen would later live in, observed that slaves were forced to prepare these meals over open fires before dawn and after dusk near their quarters and were, further, forced to carry what food they could into the fields and prepare their meals there over improvised fires. Slaves always used a communal iron pot, a staple of what would become Deen’s kitchen, to prepare their meals: in her 2011 cookbook, Deen celebrates “my big, heavy skillet” as central to how she makes cornbread.[28] More extensive iron cookware was used to prepare corn, pork, and, unlike for slaves, local fruits and vegetables for plantation owners and their families, reflective of the Southern culinary tradition’s drawing upon local resources and also white aristocrat’s reliance upon slave labor and cookery knowledge to sustain them.[29] Hot cakes, later known as hoecakes, became a popular foodstuff during this period, combined with any form of vegetable, meat, or fruit leftovers and served with every meal. These leftovers were, often, what the slave cooking staff ate after their white overseers were done with a meal. Rice preparation derived from West African tradition by which rice was steamed and boiled for fifteen minutes before the rice was allowed to absorb moisture removed from fire for over an hour, but rice and beans were more commonly served among white plantation owners than their African-American slaves, rending African food tradition from its roots.[30]

 

Studies by Wilber Atwater and colleagues in the 1890s as part of the first U.S. Agricultural Experiment Station reified poor Southern cooking traditions among African-Americans. Atwater executed a study between 1895 and 1896 along with the African-American university the Tuskegee Institute into the normative standards of kitchens and diets among Alabama blacks.[31] The results reveal a diet that had not changed since slavery and characterized by spaces as cramped as Paula Deen’s first kitchen. The survey’s “Dietary 100” described a family with cornmeal, salted fatback pork, and molasses who inhabited a kitchen with just a table, a cupboard, a frying pot and pan, and, only sometimes, a few dishes and pieces of silverware. African-American educator, activist, and founder of the Tuskegee Institute Booker T. Washington joined in the study, noting that the common diet was fat pork, cornbread—or, as Paula Deen sometimes calls it and as reported in 1896, cracklin’ bread—and collard and turnip greens cooked with bacon.[32] The majority of the African-American families that were examined as part of these studies were sharecroppers who grew cotton sometimes up to their doors in order to make as much money as possible. These families purchased their food on credit from white shopkeepers and often spent the months between harvest’s completion and the new planting season near starvation. This diurnal as well as annual dietary pattern reflected a continuation of black slave traditions. It was always the black woman, usually a wife, who woke before the rest of her family, preparing bacon one by one for her family members to eat off a single plate, and who worked throughout the day not only in the fields but also preparing meals in a scant kitchen.[33]

 

While Paula Deen and her sons have published over ten volumes addressed, just like the many different kinds of programming on the Paula Deen Network, to issues as varied as Christmas and other holiday fare[34] to healthy eating and grilling, these Southern black food traditions are those most commonly invoked by Paula Deen. Yet her acknowledgement of the spatial and other histories of these culinary traditions is scant and incorrect. In her Southern Cooking Bible, she makes her most overt acknowledgement:

 

                     African-American traditions are another great big piece of Southern cooking,                                  Cooking with produce like black-eyed peas, okra, yams, benne seeds,                                              watermelon, and peanuts—all grew roots in African soil. Techniques like                                         smoking meat, preparing pot greens with liquor and deep-frying existed in                                      Africa before crossing the Atlantic. And now, Southern fried chicken, fish, and                                fish fritters are just about the pinnacle of our cooking, y’all[35]

 

In her autobiography, she seems to half-heartedly regret her girlhood in which she and her family “lived a pretty unexamined life in terms of politics or civil rights,” but goes on to admit ignoring other significant racial historical events like the O.J. Simpson trial.[36] Rather, she intimates the degree to which she would later make racial slurs, going as far as to claim in the early days of her restaurant that she was a “slave driver” of her boys in order to achieve success.[37] Her Bible features, really almost wholly consists of, an overwhelming amount of recipes derived from black Southern plantation cooks: it contains, based upon her index, 17 bacon recipes, 13 corn recipes, 9 corn bread recipes, 8 cornmeal recipes, 12 ham recipes, and 10 pork recipes. The recipe for her “Lady & Sons Hoecakes” makes especial note of exactly who and where, according to Deen, this Southern culinary tradition came from: “I’ve heard that the name came about because farmers originally cooked these rustic little griddled breads on the back of a flat planting hoe over a fire out in the field.”[38] “Farmers” does not imply slaves, but rather exactly the opposite—poor, white farmers working their own, small farms. Although Paula Deen considers “Southern cooking…a hand-me-down art” that “came from within Grandmomma Paul” as a way to show “her love, her compassion, her godliness,”[39] she elides or forgets the many black hands through which her recipes must have passed in order to get to her.

 

            White Southern women have for over two centuries been taking recipes from African-American women and publishing them in cookbooks. This tradition testifies to the interracial circulation of foodstuffs between plantation houses and kitchens and later not only the kitchen as a shared space between black domestic workers and their white female employers but also grocery stores and bookstores where foodstuffs, magazines, and books directed at a biracial Southern audience were available for purchase. The first Southern cookbook was Mary Randolph’s The Virginia Housewife (1824).[40] Randolph was a white woman who spent her youth on a plantation before she and her husband lost the estate; they later opened a boardinghouse and there Randolph built a reputation as one of the South’s leading hostesses. In both instances, enslaved black cooks enacted the cookery that Randolph would go on to codify.[41] Paula Deen explicitly participates in this tradition, taking from removed slave kitchens the knowledge passed down to her grandmother via various largely white women’s cookbooks and making them her own. She self-consciously participates in this lineage by including the slave desert, “Southern spoon bread,” in her Bible. This recipe is first mentioned by Sarah Rutledge in The Carolina Housewife (1847), which is seen as the first Lowcountry cookbook and whose recipes, like Deen’s, often hinged upon rice.[42] Notably, African-American women also began writing cookbooks in the Reconstruction era, but these cookbooks, like What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking (1881), drew upon the mythology of the Old South in order to sell.[43] Yet the majority of Southern cookbooks from the 1870s through the present day have been written by white women despite the fact, as food historian Karen Hess claims in a reprint of Mrs. Fisher, “that most of the recipes in all Southern cookbooks are, in fact, largely recipes gleaned by the writers from African American cooks, their own and others.”[44]

 

Photographs of Paula Deen within her kitchens and featured on the covers of her cookbooks and her magazines ironically conflate her with the Southern black Mammy stereotype most well known today in the form of pancake brand icon Aunt Jemima (FIgure  5). Paula Deen may not wear an apron, but she has a wide, almost stereotyped grin that is supposed to exude Southern charm and generosity. By even ironically drawing upon the popular Southern conception of the black Old South, Paula Deen uses her calling as a cook to create a new Southern class of godly, white, upper-middle class Southern viewers and fans who derive pleasure and vindication from associating their own cookery with the mythologies—both of personal, professional ascent and of regional, historical traumas whitewashed—that Deen renders salable commodities.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

 

The 700 Club. “Paula Deen’s Southern Cooking.” Christian Broadcasting Network. October 11, 2011.

 

Anonymous. “Built-In Big Screen.” Southern Living, September 2003.

 

---. “Real Life on a Planation.” Southern Living, March 1989.

 

Atwater, W.O. and Charles D. Woods. “Dietary Studies with Reference to the Food of the Negro in Alabama in 1895 and 1896.” Bulletin no. 38, U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, Office of Experiment Stations. Washington, DC: Government Printing Stations, 1897.

 

Bower, Anne L., ed. African American Foodways: Explorations of History and Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007.

 

Carlton, Michael. “Enchanted Yesterdays.” Southern Living, November 1998.

 

Carney, Judith. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

 

Catesby, Mark. The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands. Vol. 2. Reprinted in The Colonial South Carolina Scene: Contemporary Views, 1697-1774. Edited by H. Roy Merrens. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1977.

 

CMT Cribs. Season 2, Episode 7. Country Music Television, April 17, 2009.

 

Davis, David A., et al., eds. Writing in the Kitchen: Essays on Southern Literature and Foodways. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2014.

 

Deen, Paula. Christmas with Paula Deen: Recipes and Stories from My Favorite Holiday. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007.

 

---. The Lady & Sons Savannah Country Cookbook. New York: Random House, 1998.

 

Deen, Paula with Melissa Clark. Paula Deen’s The Deen Family Cookbook. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009.

 

---. Paula Deen’s Southern Cooking Bible. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011.

 

Deen, Paula with Sherry Suib Cohen. Paula Deen: It Ain’t All about the Cookin’. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007.

 

Doyle, Alice Welsh. “The Southern Home: Smart Solutions for the Kitchen.” Southern Living, May 2002.

 

Engelhardt, Elizabeth. A Mess of Greens: Southern Gender and Southern Food. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011.

 

Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. “The Simpson Family.” ABC. January 16, 2011.

 

Ferris, Marcie Cohen. The Edible South: The Power of Food and the Making of an American Region. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

 

Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

 

Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2013 [1963].

 

Goodyear, Dana. “Paula Deen’s Ugly Roots.” The New Yorker, June 29, 2013.

 

Hallam, Linda. “Two Work Areas in One Small Kitchen.” Southern Living, March 1993.

 

Harris, Dianne. Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

 

Hess, Karen. The Carolina Rice Kitchen: The African Connection. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1992.

 

Hurst, Andria Scott. “Cooking with Paula Deen.” Southern Living, January 2006.

 

Jernigan, Sarah. “Made for Television.” Southern Living, August 2000.

 

Joyner, Louis. “Kitchen Offices.” Southern Living, October 2000.

 

---. “Preserving the Plantation.” Southern Living, February 2002.

 

Latham, Tanner. “Living in the Kitchen.” Southern Living, April 2001.

 

Lumpkin, Katherine Du Pre. The Making of a Southerner. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1991 [1946].

 

Paula’s Best Dishes. “Deen Night In.” The Food Network then the Paula Deen Network. May 18, 2009 and streaming from September 2014.

 

Paula’s World. “Welcome to the Family, Part 2.” The Paula Deen Network. Streaming from September 2014.

 

Randolph, Mary. The Virginia House-Wife. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1984 [1824].

 

Robert, Martin. “A Dream Kitchen.” Southern Living, July 2001.

 

---. “Making a Kitchen Work.” Southern Living, October 2001.

 

Rutledge, Sarah. The Carolina Housewife. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1979 [1847].

 

Sandner, Julie Feagin. “Kitchen for Family Living.” Southern Living, October 2006.

 

---. “New Kitchen, Timeless Charm.” Southern Living, July 2003.

 

Satran, Joel. “Paula Deen Aims for Comeback with ‘Uncensored’ Digital Network.” The Huffington Post, September 24, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/24/paula-deen-network_n_5876080.html.

 

Sharpless, Rebecca. Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

 

Song of the South. Directed by Harve Foster and Wilfred Jackson. Walt Disney Productions and RKO Pictures, 1946.

 

Thomas, Les. “On Television, On Sale.” Southern Living, February 2001.

 

Thompson, Annette. “Plantation of Dreams.” Southern Living, February 2003.

 

Vlach, John M. Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

 

Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery: An Autobiography. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000 [1901].

 

Weeks, Kathi. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.

 

 

 

 

[1] Paula’s World, “Welcome to the Family, Part 2,” the Paula Deen Network, 2014. See this clip from the show on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhUQIks1Q5s.

 

[2] Deen, Paula with Sherry Suib Cohen, Paula Deen: It Ain’t All about the Cookin’ (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007). Deen uses this charged label throughout her autobiography.

 

[3] The following is a video of the opening credits of all of Paula Deen’s shows, which include moving images of her televisual kitchens: https://youtu.be/Q2ZXo-j4aDc.

 

[4] Deen, Paula Deen, 211.

 

[5] The 700 Club, “Paula Deen’s Southern Cooking,” Christian Broadcasting Network, October 11, 2011. Available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSZJ2zLDP1Q.

 

[6] See Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2013). Cf. Weeks, Kathi, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 3-4.

 

[7] Friedan, 4.

 

[8] Quote taken from Dana Goodyear, “Paula Deen’s Ugly Roots,” The New Yorker, June 29, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/paula-deens-ugly-roots.

 

[9] See the Today interview from June 26, 2013 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6a8SuUDm6M.

 

[10] Satran, Joel, “Paula Deen Aims for Comeback with ‘Uncensored’ Digital Network,” The Huffington Post, Sept. 24, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/24/paula-deen-network_n_5876080.html.

 

[11] See the Oprah interview at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J3Wsp38gMA.

 

[12] Harris, Dianne, Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), esp. pp. 229-261.

 

[13] Ferris, Marcie Cohen, The Edible South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 39-47. Cf. Vlach, John M., Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993) and Lumpkin, Katherine Du Pre, The Making of a Southerner (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1991 [1946]).

 

[14] Vlach, 43. Cf. Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 98. The women of plantation homes were put in charge of the keys to the food storage rooms and/or buildings of the estate and in this way, while they did not actually cook the food, actively participated in the plantation’s foodways.

 

[15] Song of the South, directed by Harve Foster and Wilfred Jackson, Walt Disney Product and RKO Pictures, 1946. See “Sooner or Later” from Song of the South on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4g-bCQtKhM.

 

[16] Ferris, 45. Cohen is citing a letter by Ruth Hastings to Mary Ann Hastings from May 26, 1852.

 

[17] Deen, Paula Deen, 156.

 

[18] Ferris, 91-92.

 

[19] Robert, Martin, “A Dream Kitchen,” Southern Living (July 2001), 104-108.

 

[20] Carlton, Michael, “Enchanted Yesterdays,” Southern Living (November 1988), 16.

 

[21] Ibid.

 

[22] Anonymous, “Real Life on a Plantation,” Southern Living (March 1989), 39.

 

[23] Anonymous, “Built-in Big Screen,” Southern Living (September 2003), 102.

 

[24] Sadner, Julie Faegin, “New Kitchen, Timeless Charm,” Southern Living (July 2003), 100.

 

[25] Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, “The Simpson Family,” ABC, January 16, 2011. See the sound bites on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG5-3ERLboA.

 

[26] Sadner, Julie Faegin, “Kitchen for Family Living” Southern Living (October 2006), 142.

 

[27] Catesby, Mark, The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands, vol. 2, reprinted in The Colonial South Carolina Scene: Contemporary Views, 1697-1774, edited by H. Roy Merrens (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1977), 87 and 98-99.

 

[28] Ferris, 29. Cf. Deen, Paula with Melissa Clark, Paula Deen’s Southern Cooking Bible (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011).

 

[29] Ibid, 44.

 

[30] Carney, Judith, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 114. Carney cites Karen Hess, The Carolina Rice Kitchen: The African Connection (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1992), 2-26.

 

[31] Atwater, W.O. and Charles D. Woods, “Dietary Studies with Reference to the Food of the Negro in Alabama in 1895 and 1896,” bulletin no. 38, U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, Office of Experiment Stations (Washington, DC: Government Printing Stations, 1897).

 

[32] Washington, Booker T., Up from Slavery: An Autobiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000 [1901]), 112-13.

 

[33] Ibid, 9.

 

[34] Deen, Paula, Christmas with Paula Deen: Recipes and Stories from My Favorite Holiday (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007).

 

[35] Deen, Paula, “Introduction,” Southern Cooking Bible, unpaginated.

 

[36] Deen, Paula Deen, 11. See pages 9 to 12.

 

[37] Ibid, 128.

 

[38] Deen, Southern Cooking Bible, 297.

 

[39] Deen, Paula Deen, 16.

 

[40] Randolph, Mary, The Virginia House-Wife (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1984 [1824]).

 

[41] Ferris, 86-88.

 

[42] Ibid, 88. See Sarah Rutledge, The Carolina Housewife (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1979 [1847]) and Deen, Southern Cooking Bible, 257.

 

[43] Ibid, 89. Cf. Sharpless, Rebecca, Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), xix-xx.

 

[44] Quoted in Sharpless, xxi.