In 1958, Mary Tahir contributed a recipe for what she called “cabbage tamales” to a community cookbook in Tchula, Mississippi. Community cookbooks, self-published collections of donated recipes used as fundraisers for civic, church, and women’s organizations, were commonplace in midcentury America. Yet scratch the surface of Mary’s simple recipe featuring cabbage, ground beef, rice, and the basic seasonings typical of Lebanese/Syrian immigrant cuisine—salt, pepper, lemon, and garlic—and it reveals the complex cultural negotiations of immigrants straddling the color line to find a place in the 20th-century American South.
The Tchula Garden Club Cook Book provides an unusual insight into the history of racial divisions in the American South. Courtesy Special Collections at the University of Southern Mississippi
I am a third-generation Arab American and a food historian, and since coming to Mississippi, I have been looking at how women exercised influence in their communities by creating and contributing to community cookbooks. Tahir’s “cabbage tamale” recipe demonstrates the sophisticated ways that immigrant women used their culinary expertise not only to preserve their ethnic culture at home (the subject of considerable scholarship) but also to secure a place in communities that were not always welcoming to immigrants.
Tchula, a wealthy town on the eastern boundary of the Mississippi Delta, was surrounded by some of the richest cotton-growing soil in the United States, and that soil produced a small but elite white upper class. The wives and daughters of privileged families belonged to Tchula’s Garden Club and, in 1958, the women of the Garden Club created a community cookbook to raise funds to build a cemetery. Like many of the white Southern women who published community cookbooks, Garden Club members submitted recipes for regional staples such as Brunswick stew, lye hominy casserole, and squirrel stew. But they also included a surprising number of recipes whose origins could be traced to America’s immigrant communities.
Generally, white women cribbed these ethnic recipes from magazines and newspapers, tested them at family suppers, and then shared them in community cookbooks with hopes of making dinner time a little more exotic. As another Mississippi community cookbook stated, “Actual travel isn’t always possible . . . and she is a wise woman who has learned how much variety and pleasure can be added to life for those at home simply by frequent excursions into the realm of good cooking.”