Overview

A history of food in the Crescent City that explores race, power, social status, and labor. In Insatiable City, Theresa McCulla probes the overt and covert ways that the production of food and the discourse about it both created and reinforced many strains of inequality in New Orleans, a city significantly defined by its foodways. Tracking the city's economy from nineteenth-century chattel slavery to twentieth-century tourism, McCulla uses menus, cookbooks, newspapers, postcards, photography, and other material culture to limn the interplay among the production and reception of food, the inscription and reiteration of racial hierarchies, and the constant diminishment and exploitation of working-class people. The consumption of food and people, she shows, was mutually reinforced and deeply intertwined. Yet she also details how enslaved and free people of color in New Orleans used food and drink to carve paths of mobility, stability, autonomy, freedom, profit, and joy. A story of pain and pleasure, labor and leisure, Insatiable City goes far beyond the task of tracing New Orleans's culinary history to focus on how food suffuses culture and our understandings and constructions of race and power.

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9780226833804

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Reviews

“In Insatiable City, food historian McCulla captivates the reader with an adept parsing of the complexities of the food of New Orleans. From the ‘consumption’ of the enslaved as agricultural laborers and food service workers of the antebellum period to the civil rights struggles of the twentieth century, she ably investigates and untangles the nuanced web of race and class that underpins the food of the Crescent City.” -- Jessica B. Harris, author of High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America

"“[McCulla’s] stellar archival research at its most valuable unearths simple stories about complicated lives.” * The Advocate * ""Historian McCulla debuts with a fascinating dissection of the tangled links between consumption, food, and race in a city long known for its excesses. She contends that 'plenitude grew out of the labors of people in bondage' in 19th-century New Orleans, both in the form of food harvested by enslaved people, and 'slave auctions' held in coffeehouses, taverns, and hotels, where the combined 'entertainment' of food, drink, and enslaved bodies were served to locals and tourists. . . . The result is a top-notch scholarly study of the complex relationships between entertainment, consumption, and Black life in the American South."" * Publishers Weekly * “A deep dive into the history of food culture in the Crescent City and the ties—generational, racial, and political—that have made the city’s distinct cuisine one of the most acclaimed in the world. . . . Insatiable City is a book all Orleanians, as well as the city’s millions of visitors, could benefit from reading, if only as a cogent reminder of the blood and tears mixed into that savory dish they’re about to enjoy.” * Food and Environment Reporting Network * “In Insatiable City, McCulla captivates the reader with an adept parsing of the complexities of the food of New Orleans. From the ‘consumption’ of the enslaved as agricultural laborers and food service workers of the antebellum period to the civil rights struggles of the twentieth century, she ably investigates and untangles the nuanced web of race and class that underpins the food of the Crescent City.” -- Jessica B. Harris, author of High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America “McCulla’s Insatiable City begins amid rice and people on the Aurore, a slave ship traveling from Benin to Louisiana, and ends in present day New Orleans. Along the way she demonstrates time and time and time again that the celebrated food of New Orleans owes much of its greatness to the presence of African people, African intellect, and African ingredients. This is a scholarly work of the first rank.” -- Lolis Eric Elie, author of Treme: Stories and Recipes from the Heart of New Orleans “With precision and care, McCulla considers how New Orleans’s culinary and racial histories have simmered together for centuries. Insatiable City offers a necessary reappraisal of the city’s beauty and its cruelty.” -- Andy Horowitz, author of Katrina: A History, 1915–2015 “Insatiable City is a comprehensive story of the ‘black hand in the pot’ in New Orleans. McCulla rightfully grounds Black chefs and cooks in the making of New Orleans greatest legacy, Creole cuisine. From the nineteenth-century marchandes who sold sweet calas fritters in Congo Square to civil rights activist Rudy Joseph Lombard who documented some of the greatest executive Black chefs in his groundbreaking cookbook Creole Feast, McCulla amplifies the culinary geniuses of Belle New Orleans.”  -- Zella Palmer, author of Recipes and Remembrances of Fair Dillard, 1869–2019"

Author Information

Theresa McCulla is a curator and historian, and the former curator of the American Brewing History Initiative at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.

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