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WORK TITLE: Bound to the Fire: How Virginia’s Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American Cuisine
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://boundtothefire.com/
CITY:
STATE: VA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:College of William and Mary, B.A., 2002; University of California, Berkeley, M.A., 2006, Ph.D., 2010.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. James River Institute for Archaeology, Williamsburg, VA, archaeologist, 1996-2000, research associate, 2016—; Jamestown Rediscovery, VA, archaeology lab technician, 1997-2000; LSA Associates, Richmond, CA, archaeologist, 2003-06; University of California, Berkeley, graduate student instructor, 2004-09; Randolph College, Lynchburg, VA, visiting professor, 2010-12, 2017—; Roanoke College, Salem, VA, assistant professor, 2012-14; University of Virginia, Charlottesville, research associate, 2014-16; Deetz Consulting Services, VA, historical consultant, 2014—. Also, worked as a cook at Cafe Venezia, 1990-2010, and a restaurant manager for Spettro, Oakland, CA, 1995-2005.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Kelley Fanto Deetz is a writer and educator based in Virginia. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the College of William and Mary and both a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Deetz’s research focuses on the history of the antebellum south. She has worked as an archaeologist and research associate for companies, including the James River Institute, LSA Associates, and Jamestown Rediscovery. Deetz has served on the faculty of colleges, including the University of California, Berkeley, Randolph College, the University of Virginia, and Roanoke College. In 2014, she founded her own historical consulting firm, Deetz Consulting Services. Deetz is also a former cook and restaurant manager.
In 2017, Deetz released her first book, Bound to the Fire: How Virginia’s Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American Cuisine. The volume blends her experience in the food industry with her expertise in history and archaeology. Deetz provides details on how enslaved cooks worked and lived. Her research is focused on locations in Virginia during the 1700s and 1800s. Deetz calls attention to images of African American cooks that have been used as advertising for food products, such as Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima. She suggests that these images do not accurately capture the inventiveness and strength that the real enslaved cooks exhibited. These men and women adapted elements of traditional African cooking, using the ingredients they had readily available and created a hybrid cuisine that has become part of the culture of the south and of America as a whole.
The book includes recipes for dishes that were developed by enslaved people during that time period. In an interview with Mike Holtzclaw, contributor to the Virginia Daily Press website, Deetz acknowledged the draw of the recipes. She stated: “I call the book a gateway drug into talking about slavery. They come to hear about pies and puddings and stews, but the story is all tethered together. You can’t have the romance of the food without the pain of slavery—there’s this holistic understanding of what their lives were like.” Deetz continued: “The recipes are there, but the majority of the book—maybe ninety-eight percent—is social history.”
Bound to the Fire received favorable reviews. Writing in Booklist, Emily Dziuban commented: “Scholarly yet readable, Deetz’s book honors these American ancestors by reclaiming their rightful places and stories.” “This is a lively and insightful account of a still-largely-unfamiliar aspect of the history of American slavery,” asserted a Publishers Weekly critic.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, September 15, 2017, Emily Dziuban, review of Bound to the Fire: How Virginia’s Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American Cuisine, p. 8.
Publishers Weekly, September 4, 2017, review of Bound to the Fire, p. 79.
ONLINE
Conversation, https://theconversation.com/ (May 28, 2018), author profile.
Daily Press Online (VA), http://www.dailypress.com/ (November 25, 2017), Mike Holtzclaw, author interview.
Kelley Fanto Deetz, Ph.D.
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Author, Bound to the Fire: How Virginia's Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American Cuisine, Visiting Prof. Randolph College
Lynchburg, Virginia Area
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Randolph College
University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
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Historian, archaeologist, facilitator of dialogues on race, historical consultant, public historian.
Media (1)This position has 1 media
The Shared History Project
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Experience
Randolph College
Visiting Assistant Professor
Company NameRandolph College
Dates EmployedJan 2017 – Present Employment Duration1 yr 5 mos
James River Institute for Archaeology
Research Associate
Company NameJames River Institute for Archaeology
Dates EmployedOct 2016 – Present Employment Duration1 yr 8 mos
Shared History Project
Founding Director, historical consultant
Company NameShared History Project
Dates EmployedSep 2016 – Present Employment Duration1 yr 9 mos
LocationVirginia
University of Virginia
Research Associate
Company NameUniversity of Virginia
Dates EmployedJul 2014 – Aug 2016 Employment Duration2 yrs 2 mos
Roanoke College
Assistant Professor of History, Director of the Public History Program
Company NameRoanoke College
Dates EmployedAug 2012 – Jul 2014 Employment Duration2 yrs
LocationSalem, VA
Randolph College
Ainsworth Visiting Professor of American Culture
Company NameRandolph College
Dates EmployedJul 2010 – Sep 2012 Employment Duration2 yrs 3 mos
Cafe Venezia
Cook
Company NameCafe Venezia
Dates EmployedJun 1990 – May 2010 Employment Duration20 yrs
UC Berkeley
Graduate Student Instructor
Company NameUC Berkeley
Dates EmployedAug 2004 – May 2009 Employment Duration4 yrs 10 mos
LSA Associates, Inc.
Archaeologist
Company NameLSA Associates, Inc.
Dates EmployedMar 2003 – Mar 2006 Employment Duration3 yrs 1 mo
LocationRichmond, California
Richmond
Spettro
Restaurant Manager, Catering Chef
Company NameSpettro
Dates EmployedJan 1995 – Apr 2005 Employment Duration10 yrs 4 mos
LocationOakland, California
Jamestown Rediscovery
Archaeology lab technician
Company NameJamestown Rediscovery
Dates EmployedMay 1997 – May 2000 Employment Duration3 yrs 1 mo
LocationJamestown, Virginia
JAMES RIVER INSTITUTE FOR ARCHAEOLOGY, INC.
Archaeologist
Company NameJAMES RIVER INSTITUTE FOR ARCHAEOLOGY, INC.
Dates EmployedMay 1996 – May 2000 Employment Duration4 yrs 1 mo
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Education
University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
Degree NamePh.D Field Of StudyAfrican Diaspora Studies
Dates attended or expected graduation 2006 – 2010
University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
Degree NameM.A Field Of StudyAfrican American Studies
Dates attended or expected graduation 2004 – 2006
William & Mary
William & Mary
Degree NameB.A Field Of StudyBlack Studies/History
Dates attended or expected graduation 1999 – 2002
Activities and Societies: Founding President-Black Studies Club
Skills & Endorsements
History
See 84 endorsements for History84
Endorsed by Ywone Edwards-Ingram, Ph.D. and 16 others who are highly skilled at this
Endorsed by 14 of Kelley Fanto’s colleagues at Randolph College
Research
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Endorsed by Whitney Battle-Baptiste and 5 others who are highly skilled at this
Endorsed by 10 of Kelley Fanto’s colleagues at Randolph College
Higher Education
See 56 endorsements for Higher Education56
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Accomplishments
Kelley Fanto has 1 publication1
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Author
Kelley Deetz
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Comments
Historian, University of California, Berkeley
ProfileArticlesActivity
I am a scholar and professor of African Diaspora history. My scholarship and teaching focus on constructions of race, identity, culture, public narratives, and histories within the African Diaspora. My forthcoming book is entitled “Bound to the Fire: Virginia’s Enslaved Cooks, Conjuring, and Community”. I specialize in the following: Material and Visual Culture, Black Expressive Culture, Historical Archaeology, Public History, Cultural Resource Management, Foodways, Gender, Domestic Labor, Black Feminist Thought, Cultural Landscapes, Plantation Museums, Cultural Tourism, Memorials, and Memory.
Experience
2014–present Historical Consultant , Deetz Consulting Services: Historical Interpretation and Facilitation
2014–2016 Research Associate , University of Virginia
2012–2014 Assistant Professor/ Director of Public History, Roanoke College
2010–2012 Ainsworth Visiting Scholar, Randolph College
1996–2010 Archaeologist/Historian , Cultural Resources
Education
2010 University of California, Berkeley, Ph.D.
2006 University of California, Berkeley, M.A.
2002 College of William and Mary, B.A.
QUOTED: "I call the book a gateway drug into talking about slavery. They come to hear about pies and puddings and stews, but the story is all tethered together. You can’t have the romance of the food without the pain of slavery—there’s this holistic understanding of what their lives were like."
"The recipes are there, but the majority of the book—maybe ninety-eight percent—is social history."
Mike HoltzclawContact Reporter
Daily Press
Kelley Fanto Deetz’s new book “Bound to the Fire” is about both cooking and history — but she is very clear about which part of the narrative is more important.
The book, subtitled “How Virginia’s Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American Cuisine,” traces the roots of many traditional dishes back to cooks who were held as plantation slaves.
ADVERTISING
“When I give talks, the majority of people come to hear about food,” Deetz said in a phone interview from her home in Lynchburg. “But I call the book a gateway drug into talking about slavery. They come to hear about pies and puddings and stews, but the story is all tethered together. You can’t have the romance of the food without the pain of slavery — there’s this holistic understanding of what their lives were like.”
Yes, there are recipes — Deetz, a trained chef, admits she is particularly fond of the okra stew.
But this is not a cookbook.
Colonial Williamsburg historian searches for the culinary gene
“The recipes are there, but the majority of the book — maybe 98 percent — is social history,” she said. “The recipes are used to illustrate the labor that went into making a dish, more than telling you how to recreate it. The point of citing the recipes is how labor-intensive they were.”
Deetz got her undergraduate degree in African-American history from the College of William and Mary in 2002. A California native, she got her master’s and her doctorate from Berkeley. The book, which came out earlier this month, started as her doctoral dissertation.
Much of her research was done at the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library at Colonial Williamsburg. That was where she perused 18th-century publications and kept seeing ads for the buying and selling of cooks — the purchase of human beings.
The concept wasn’t new to her, of course, but the stark language of the ads caught her attention, and when she tried to learn more online she found very few published works that covered this specific story before Reconstruction.
“I just thought, wow,” she said.”I have all this training in history and in archaeology, and I had so many questions. What did their kitchens look like? What was it like to labor on a plantation? What kind of training did they have? It hit me like an avalanche.”
As she studied the topic, she began learning not only about the food and the living conditions, but about the people as well.
In the book she writes about enslaved cooks such as Fanny Goode and Delp Mitchell, both of whom were hanged for poisoning their owners. She was fascinated by the story of a Surry County cook who died at age 50 from a hemorrhage in her womb — not related to childbirth, but to a lifetime of hard labor in the heat of a plantation hearth.
Pictures: Colonial Williamsburg Brick Kiln Firing
Annual brick firing at Colonial Williamsburg on Thursday, Nov. 16, 2017. During the summer months workers molded 25,000 bricks and now work nonstop for five days heating the kiln to 2000 degrees fahrenheit. The bricks will be used throughout Colonial Williamsburg for project repairs and new construction. (Aileen Devlin/Daily Press)
And then there is the saga of Hercules, who cooked for George Washington and became “America’s first celebrity chef,” Deetz says. She describes how Hercules dressed fancy and was greeted with respect in the streets of Philadelphia — and how Washington would shuttle him back and forth to Mount Vernon every few months to get around Pennsylvania laws that limited the amount of time a slave could be held. Deetz says Hercules eventually was demoted to stable duty, but escaped — leaving his children behind — and may have made his way to Europe to resume his culinary calling.
After spending years researching and writing the book, now she is busy promoting it.
Reviewer Emily Dzuibun, writing on the Booklist website, called the book “scholarly yet readable,” and noted that it “honors these American ancestors by reclaiming their rightful places and stories.”
Deetz knows that many people will pick up the book because of their interest in food and traditional Southern cooking. She hopes they will learn something from the rest of the story.
“It’s really about teaching history through different lenses,” Deetz said. “It took a lot of time to really look into the full story. So much of what has been written before this is about post-Emancipation. That’s still very important, but it’s a very different thing than being in bondage.”
Holtzclaw can be reached by phone at 757-928-6479 or on Twitter @mikeholtzclaw.
QUOTED: "Scholarly yet readable, Deetz's book honors these American ancestors by reclaiming their rightful places and stories."
5/17/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1526599751628 1/3
Print Marked Items
Bound to the Fire: How Virginia's
Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American
Cuisine
Emily Dziuban
Booklist.
114.2 (Sept. 15, 2017): p8.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* Bound to the Fire: How Virginia's Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American
Cuisine.
By Kelley Fanto Deetz.
Nov. 2017. 182p. illus. Univ. Press of Kentucky, $29.95 (9780813174730). 641.
Aunt Jemima syrup and Uncle Ben's rice reinforce imagery of friendly black cooks, which Deetz's first
book redefines as part of the racist ideology that left the primary contributions enslaved Afro-Virginian
cooks made to American cuisine unacknowledged. Her book, nine years in the researching and writing,
calls upon plantations still giving tours, historians, chefs, and all Americans to develop an honest awareness
of enslaved cooks, specifically in Virginia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The very architecture
of the white elite's preferred Georgian-style mansion replicated in the landscape the separation, control, and
power needed to enact enslavement. Kitchens were liminal spaces apart from main houses, which were
semipublic entertainment venues. As abolitionist thinking took root, homes evolved to include covered
walkways and dumbwaiters, keeping black people hidden while they created meals for white people.
Herself a former cook, Deetz ensures her readers understand the significant intellect, physical strength,
endurance, and capabilities required for enslaved cooks to produce four meals per day from scratch in hot,
open-hearth kitchens while under the constant threat of psychological abuse and violence. Scholarly yet
readable, Deetz's book honors these American ancestors by reclaiming their rightful places and stories.--
Emily Dziuban
5/17/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Dziuban, Emily. "Bound to the Fire: How Virginia's Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American Cuisine."
Booklist, 15 Sept. 2017, p. 8. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A507359770/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e496b9d5.
Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A507359770
QUOTED: "This is a lively and insightful account of a still-largely-unfamiliar aspect of the history of American slavery."
5/17/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1526599751628 3/3
Bound to the Fire: How Virginia's
Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American
Cuisine
Publishers Weekly.
264.36 (Sept. 4, 2017): p79+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Bound to the Fire: How Virginia's Enslaved Cooks
Helped Invent American Cuisine
Kelley Fanto Deetz. Univ. of Kentucky, $29.95
(162p) ISBN 978-0-8131-7473-0
Deetz, an assistant professor of history at Roanoke College and a former chef, illuminates the real lives of
enslaved cooks on the plantations of 18th--and 19th-century Virginia. Images of African-American cooks in
American popular culture, such as Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben, are largely advertising agency creations
associated with servility rather than with creativity or self-determination, she argues. But these men and
women shaped both plantation life and Southern cuisine, while occupying a kitchen space that was "a
crossroads between black and white worlds." Though few of these enslaved women and men left written
records of their experiences, Deetz draws on sources that include runaway-slave ads, travelogues, and
recipe collections in order to catch glimpses of cooks in the kitchen and beyond. Her vivid portraits reveal
these cooks producing the African-influenced dishes at the core of Southern hospitality, and occasionally
poisoning their owners with those same dishes. Most importantly, Deetz recasts the image of the plantation
cook as a figure of power, dignity, and, frequently, resistance. This is a lively and insightful account of a
still-largely-unfamiliar aspect of the history of American slavery. Illus. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Bound to the Fire: How Virginia's Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American Cuisine." Publishers Weekly, 4
Sept. 2017, p. 79+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A505468113/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4f19b7ff. Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A505468113