Many customs, especially culinary ones, are valued within cultures because food often unites people together. Most people don’t think about the history behind their food, but the History Club at Auburn University, along with the Lee County Historical Society, is working to change that. The organizations are creating a cookbook with southern recipes, with information about their true origins, to bring awareness to the underrepresented groups that formed southern culinary culture.
The History Club’s mission with the cookbook is to create a collection of recipes that capture the spectrum of identities and other cultures that make up food culture in the American South. The History Club is collaborating with the Lee County Historical Society to source recipes and add the dishes’ historical origins to the cookbook.
The main goal of the cookbook is to bring awareness to various underrepresented groups and show how their culture has, over time, become assimilated into southern culture. The cookbook will honor the stories of these groups, such as enslaved people in the American South, through personal narratives in addition to general historical accounts…