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TCU Center for Texas Studies - Who Eats Cornbread? Who Eats Biscuits? Baking and Texas Identity

Who Eats Cornbread? Who Eats Biscuits? Baking and Texas Identity
Rebecca Sharpless, Professor of History, TCU

Attention foodies! As we celebrate African American History Month, join us as TCU history professor Rebecca Sharpless will discuss the history of baking in Texas and the American South. Speaking from research conducted for her latest book, Grain and Fire, she will weave together the story of how three global food traditions--Indigenous American, European, and African--collided with and merged in the economies, cultures, and foodways of the South to create what we know as the southern baking tradition. As her title implies, who used white cornmeal and who used yellow, who put sugar in their cornbread and who did not held meaning for southerners, as did the proportions of flour, fat, and liquid in biscuits. Food speaks volumes. Come hear what it has to say!

Rebecca Sharpless is professor of history at Texas Christian University where she specializes in women’s history, food, and labor. She previously served as director of the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. Sharpless is the award-winning author of Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865–1960 and Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms, 1900-1940 and is a contributor to many additional publications. Her most recent book is Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South.

Feb 4, 2023 10:30 AM in Central Time (US and Canada)