SOURCE: Titus, Mary. “The Dining Room Door Swings Both Ways: Food, Race, and Domestic Space in the Nineteenth-Century South.” In Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts, edited by Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson, pp. 243-56. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997.

In the following essay, Titus studies representations of foodways and dining rituals on the antebellum plantation.

Oaklands was famous for many things: its fine light-bread, its cinnamon cakes, its beat biscuit, its fricasseed chicken, its butter and cream, its wine-sauces, its plum-puddings, its fine horses, its beautiful meadows, its sloping green hills, and last, but not least, its refined and agreeable society.

—Letitia Burwell, A Girl's Life in Virginia before the War

Letitia Burwell's easy movement from cuisine to company has not lost its appeal. One hundred years after the publication of her romantic memoir, it remains a characteristic gesture in descriptions of southern living. Yet...