Martha McCulloch-Williams’s Dishes and Beverages of the Old South, from 1915, is quite a unique book. McCulloch-Williams had grown up on a plantation in the years before the Civil War, and the book is a combination of cookbook and reminiscences of her childhood. Her childhood was incredibly privileged, as her father owned the plantation and the many slaves necessary to work on the plantation.

Slavery was awful but you certainly don’t get that idea from reading the book, nor should you expect to. The slaves depicted in the book are generally happy and dedicated to their work. If the book fails at describing what slavery was actually like, though, it does succeed at describing some of the locations slaves worked in. One of those locations, the focus of cooking on a plantation, was the plantation’s kitchen, and the book has some good descriptions of that plantation’s kitchen.

The kitchen on her father’s plantation was a log cabin, about twenty feet square. As she writes, the building was “built stoutly of hewn logs, with a sharply pitched board roof, a movable loft, a plank floor boasting inch-wide cracks, a door, two windows and a fireplace that took up a full half of one end.” (12) This design was typical for plantation kitchens, and the loft was often where the cook slept.

McCulloch-Williams doesn’t say how many slaves her father owned but the kitchen was set up to cook for a large number of people. The fireplace was the main cooking space and her description puts it at about ten feet wide by three feet deep, and it was probably tall enough for the cook to walk into. Instead of having one large fire, cooking fireplaces were set up for a number of smaller fires to be burning at once, each having iron pots of varying sizes set over them.

Cooking over an open fire, in that way, isn’t practiced today–grilling over an open fire is only a small component of how they used to cook. McCulloch-Williams describes a cooking technique that I haven’t seen used today, but one that certainly could be if you cooked with a live fire. We might assume that cast iron pots, placed directly on hot coals, would become red hot, but McCulloch-Williams points out that that didn’t happen. She doesn’t say why, but it probably had to do with the fact that the pots would not be placed on the coals for hours, since that would certainly burn the food, and because the food in the pots would keep the overall temperature of the iron below what would cause the metal to become hot. No, the red hot material was actually the pot lid, which she says was hung over the fire before applying to a pot, and then, when it was applied, live coals would be shoveled onto the pot lid. As she puts it, “then the blanket of coals and embers held in heat which, radiating downward, made the cooking even.” (14)

You can download Dishes and Beverages of the Old South for free from Google Books.