Cleora S Kitchen

Cleora's Kitchens tells the story of the Black settlement of Oklahoma. Cleora's parents, children of former slaves in Texas, came with other former slaves in covered wagons for free land and the hope Oklahoma was to become a Black and Indian state. These early settlers built Black towns and successful businesses. Oklahoma did not fulfill the promise of a Black and Indian state, but these pioneers prospered and made a good life for themselves. In Tulsa, Oklahoma the Black community of Greenwood was called the Black Wall Street of America.In 1921 a terrible Race Riot destroyed much of the thriving Greenwood community. The year after the riot Cleora moved to Tulsa to help rebuild from the ashes. Cleora joined the Vernon AME church and helped to feed the struggling community from the church kitchen. Cleora's amazing culinary gifts were soon recognized and she was in demand by both black and white Tulsa. She catered the Tulsa Opera Guild as well as the Greenwood Jazz Street dances. Cab Calloway, who often played in Greenwood, said Cleora's chicken and dumplings were the best in the world. Cleora describes the life of her pioneer family and gives us family recipes not to be found anywhere else.Cleora's mother's hickory nut cake, beaten biscuits, possum grape wine, mustard greens, and famous chicken and dumplings are beyond compare. Cleora shares her famous baked fudge recipe from her bakery she opened on Greenwood. Cleora also gives us recipes she cooked for newly rich oil families, both black and white. Donald Simmons, the first Black Oil man in America, paid for the typing of Cleora's hand written story and recipes.

Sheds light on the history of food, cooking, and eating. This collection of essays investigates the connections between food studies and women's studies. From women in colonial India to Armenian American feminists, these essays show how food has served as a means to assert independence and personal identity.

The field of food studies has been growing rapidly over the last thirty years and has exploded since the turn of the millennium. Scholars from an array of disciplines have trained fresh theoretical and methodological approaches onto new dimensions of the human relationship to food. This anthology capitalizes on this particular cultural moment to bring to the fore recent scholarship that focuses on innovative ways people are recasting food in public spaces to challenge hegemonic practices and meanings. Organized into five interrelated sections on food production – consumption, performance, Diasporas, and activism – articles aim to provide new perspectives on the changing meanings and uses of food in the twenty-first century.

As African American women left the plantation economy behind, many entered domestic service in southern cities and towns. Cooking was one of the primary jobs they performed, feeding generations of white families and, in the process, profoundly shaping southern foodways and culture. Rebecca Sharpless argues that, in the face of discrimination, long workdays, and low wages, African American cooks worked to assert measures of control over their own lives. As employment opportunities expanded in the twentieth century, most African American women chose to leave cooking for more lucrative and less oppressive manufacturing, clerical, or professional positions. Through letters, autobiography, and oral history, Sharpless evokes African American women's voices from slavery to the open economy, examining their lives at work and at home.

Albert Einstein's brain floats in a Tupperware bowl in a gray duffel bag in the trunk of a Buick Skylark barreling across America. Driving the car is journalist Michael Paterniti. Sitting next to him is an eighty-four-year-old pathologist named Thomas Harvey, who performed the autopsy on Einstein in 1955 -- then simply removed the brain and took it home. And kept it for over forty years. On a cold February day, the two men and the brain leave New Jersey and light out on I-70 for sunny California, where Einstein's perplexed granddaughter, Evelyn, awaits. And riding along as the imaginary fourth passenger is Einstein himself, an id-driven genius, the original galactic slacker with his head in the stars. Part travelogue, part memoir, part history, part biography, and part meditation, Driving Mr. Albert is one of the most unique road trips in modern literature.