Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Cooking for the Quarters

Cooking for the Quarters

West, Emily

Hardcover

Series: Cambridge Studies on the American South

General United States History

ISBN10: 1009544403
ISBN13: 9781009544405
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: Aug 20 2026
Pages: 328
Weight: 1.34
Height: 0.88 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Women who prepared food for enslaved people, rather than enslavers, have been neglected in historical scholarship. Their labor within the quarters has been marginalized, belittled, and even ignored, because it fell within the remit of gendered care and nurture. In this book, Emily West illustrates how these mostly older women performed vital roles in slaveholding sites, as their enslavers increasingly tried to regulate food distribution, preparation, and consumption. Enslavers attempted to impose highly efficient, communal food regimes to minimize waste and time lost from work elsewhere. They routinely tasked older women with the feeding and care of infants, but also deployed them to prepare food for children and enslaved adults to eat collectively. Conversely, in the relative privacy of the quarters, where enslaved people preferred to eat, cooking became both a form of gendered exploitation, and an expression of love, empowerment, and pleasure.

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