How Cookbooks Write (and Rewrite) History

What is Brunswick stew? Even at a glance, that's a complicated question—no fewer than three places in the Southeastern United States claim the dish as their own. Whatever its provenance, it's by now a Southern staple, a hearty mix of barbecued meat and vegetables that's said to be the creation of an enslaved cook named Jimmy Matthews, who made it one night at his owner's hunting camp. A roadside monument in Brunswick County, Virginia, pays tribute to this story.

Carrie Helms Tippen

Whitney Sawyer Photography

In a new article, Carrie Helms Tippen looks closer into Brunswick stew's history. She's not so much interested in the facts of its origin, though, as she is in how the stew is explained in the present day—specifically, in present-day cookbooks. Who credits a slave with creating this feel-good dish? Who leaves that uncomfortable fact out altogether? A scholar of literature, Southern studies, and food studies who teaches at Pittsburgh's Chatham University, Tippen looked at how the backstory of the stew was described in nine different Southern cookbooks from 1981 to 2011. She found that while earlier cookbooks included some version of the Jimmy Matthews story, however whitewashed—one described Matthews as his owner's "loyal black retainer"—more recent descriptions of Brunswick stew have skipped the origin story altogether.

Instead, their authors write about the recipe in a more personal way, relating it to family and memory—of the "it's just something we've always eaten" variety—and avoid altogether its historical origins. "Erasure is the inevitable consequence of this turn from history to memory," Tippen writes, "supplanting the innovations of African American and Native American cooks and marginalizing their share of Southern culture and identity."

I recently talked to Tippen about whom recipes leave out of history, and how, and what it might look like for more cookbooks to fully explore painful historical truths.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Tell us what Brunswick stew is. Or rather, what’s the most basic version, since there are so many variations.

Roy Blount Jr. said, "Brunswick stew is what happens when small mammals carrying ears of corn fall into barbecue pits." The bottom line is that it has to have some kind of barbecued meat. Almost all versions are tomato-based now. The first one, if you go by the Virginia story, was kind of an onion-and-squirrel base without tomatoes, but most versions you’ll find today have tomatoes, corn, potatoes, onions, and then some kind of barbecued meat.

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The cookbooks you studied all focused on the story that came out of one Brunswick—Brunswick County, Virginia—although there are three Brunswicks that claim this stew.

Most of the stories that I find in cookbooks bring up three different locations: Brunswick County, Virginia; Brunswick, Georgia; and then North Carolina, which is where you can find Brunswick stew on the side of barbecue just about everywhere. I’ve seen a couple other narratives that attribute it to the Earl of Brunswick, who came to visit someplace in the South that was not named Brunswick. But because he was there and he liked the stew, they started calling it Brunswick stew.

There’s a basic story at the root of how these cookbooks talk about the stew. And that story is of an enslaved person named Jimmy Matthews, who created it. Where did the story come from?

It’s the kind of recipe that calls for a historical story to go with it.

That’s a good question. I’ve seen it as early as the America Eats collection, which were oral histories collected during the Depression by the WPA. He’s not named as Jimmy Matthews, but it is sort of the same basic story: A slave who was the cook for a hunting camp shot all of the squirrels and cooked all of their food at once. And in that story it’s a bumbling mistake—he’s not supposed to do that. It’s a story of how bad and careless the slave is, but he creates this delicious dish that everyone loves.

That’s the oldest one that I’ve seen. Raymond Sokolov’s history Fading Feast has some documentary evidence in it. He’s got some papers that he cites from the Haskins family, which was Jimmy Matthews's slave owner.

How did you come to be interested in the Brunswick stew story?

I’m from Texas, and we don’t eat Brunswick stew in Texas—I’d never heard of it. But I study Southern cookbooks—I still consider Texas to be the South, and my upbringing to be Southern—so when I’m looking through these cookbooks and I keep finding Brunswick stew, and the same story over and over again, it really caught my attention. I could narrow down what I was looking at and get really deeply into one story that keeps changing. As I write in the article, “Brunswick stew” doesn’t describe what it is, so you have to say something about it in your recipe headnote. You have to tell people a little bit about why it’s called that. It’s the kind of recipe that calls for a historical story to go with it.

Tell us about how the story evolved in these cookbooks that you studied.

The historical marker doesn’t say 'slave,' it doesn’t say 'owner.' It says 'camp cook.' There’s a lot implied in those small words.

I started with Raymond Sokolov. I picked him because he is cited in other sources—he’s part of this intertextual conversation. His narrative starts with “Uncle” Jimmy Matthews. Then Sokolov is cited [in a later cookbook] and the “Uncle” is taken away, and it’s just "Jimmy Matthews." Then later it’s "Uncle Jimmy," in a different story. So even just the way they present his name—if they name him at all—suggests what agency he has as an African-American person, as a body. It depends on whether he’s a “chef,” which is what the Lee brothers call him—they call him an African-American chef, and take away his slaveness altogether—

The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook describes his owner as his "employer."

And they are citing that Virginia historical marker—the historical marker doesn’t say “slave,” it doesn’t say “owner.” It says “camp cook.” “His camp cook.” It doesn’t say "chef," it doesn’t say "slave" and it doesn’t say "owner." There’s a lot implied in some of those small words.

So you look at the way that Brunswick stew recipes were described in cookbooks over the course of about 30 years, and you find a trend away from the historical toward the personal. The first few recipes contained notes about the stew's uncomfortable historical origins, but authors more recently frame it as family tradition: "We ate this all the time when I was going up."

With the slave narrative—the story of Jimmy Matthews the slave—there’s a lot in there that people are not going to find entertaining. They don’t want to read about that. Memory is something that’s safer. It’s a little more pleasant.

If the history’s been told, then the personal is the way to say something new, to say something original. I think, especially for chef-authored cookbooks, that personality is really important, because you’re really selling the chef. You’re selling the self. So that personal experience, or their personal innovation, on the recipe, that’s what’s important there. So turn to the memory there.

And it’s shying away from the part of history that has traditionally been described, especially in Southern studies, as a “burden.” The “burden” of Southern history is a thing that a lot of people find to be uncomfortable. Whether you’re white—some people describe it as white guilt—but it also might be something you don’t want to participate in if you’re not white. It’s not a story that is really a celebration, and cookbooks have this really important role as being celebrators, the celebrators of cuisine, and happy, good feelings surrounding entertaining, and feeding a lot of people. So talking about slavery can kind of bring you down.

One thing that your article got me thinking was, what would it look like if a cookbook did that? That explored some of worse parts of the history of their recipes?

That’s something that I think about a lot. Whenever I critique something, especially cookbooks, I try to think about, like: So what’s the other option? What is that going to look like? I once put out a poll on Facebook: What if I wrote a cookbook that was, like, sad? What would a sad cookbook look like—a really complicated one?

What would a sad cookbook look like—a really complicated one?

I think we do have some examples out there. John Egerton’s Southern Food is this huge tome, and he spends a lot of time writing and thinking through the history. It’s a lot more story and narrative than it is recipe, even though there are tons of recipes in it. So I think a cookbook that really grappled with it would have to be longer, it would have to be a little less easy to use, but a lot more focused on reading. It would be a reader’s cookbook, maybe, instead of a cook’s cookbook.

There are some really good African-American folks who are doing great work like this—Jessica Harris and Michael Twitty. They’re telling hard stories and also celebrating culture at the same time. What I think is important to know about me is that I’m not a food historian. I don’t have a good, right history of Brunswick stew, and I don’t really intend to try to find one. I’m really more interested in how and why histories get written, or how they get used to convince people of things. So I’m not the person to ask about, what is the real story about the origin of Brunswick stew? I don’t even know if that’s a productive question to ask.