Taste of Summer or Building Houses out of Chicken Legs

Taste of Summer: Inspired Recipes for Casual Entertaining Completely Revised and in Color

Author: Diane Rossen Worthington

Chilled gazpacho, fresh lobster salad, buttery shortcake piled high with sweet strawberries--summer cooking is all about making the most of the season's luscious abundance. Revised and updated, this best-selling cookbook now has a beautiful full-color format packed with photographs, recipes, menus, and colorful sidebars offering helpful hints. Cooking and entertaining has never been so easy and inviting as with these simple, classic favorites, from fresh Whole Poached Salmon with Pesto Cucumber Sauce to golden brown lattice-crust fruit pies. Whether you're toasting a new graduate with a backyard buffet or relaxing under the stars with a picnic for two, The Taste of Summer has something special for every occasion and promises to delight and inspire all year round.

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Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power

Author: Psyche A Williams Forson

Williams-Forson examines the complexity of black women's legacies with food as a form of cultural work. While acknowledging the negative interpretations of black culture associated with chicken imagery, Williams-Forson focuses her analysis on the ways black women have forged their own self-definitions and relationships to "the gospel bird."

From personal interviews to the comedy of Chris Rock, from commercial advertisements to the art of Kara Walker, and from cookbooks to literature, Williams-Forson considers how black women defy conventional representations of blackness in relationship to these foods and exercise influence through food preparation and distribution.

Publishers Weekly

The humble chicken has possessed complicated associations for African-Americans from earliest slavery times, especially for women, who traditionally had to cook the bird for white kitchens. Moreover, hawking chicken by "waiter carriers" became a key source of income for poor disenfranchised blacks, while stealing chickens reflected a kinship with African-American "trickster heroism," according to Williams-Forson, an American studies professor at the University of Maryland. In her valuable though dense and scholarly study, Williams-Forson explores how the power of food images advanced the rhetoric of black stereotypes in lore and literature, for example, as portrayed in "coon" songs like Paul Laurence Dunbar's popular "Who Dat Say Chicken in Dis Crowd" and characterizations of mammies in advertisements in upscale magazines. With the Great Migration, blacks took their cultural practices with them, literally, in shoe boxes containing fried chicken, and their route became known as the "chicken bone express." The author discusses chicken as "the gospel bird" in African-American churches (the strength of one's cooking skills elevated one's status with the preacher), and how eating chicken (or eschewing it) provides a way for blacks to "signify" class and status. Following her hard-going study is a staggeringly thorough bibliography. (June) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Table of Contents:

1	We called ourselves waiter carriers	13
2	"Who dat say chicken is dis crowd" : black men, visual imagery, and the ideology of fear	38
3	Gnawing on a chicken bone in my own house : cultural contestation, black women's work, and class	80
4	Traveling the chicken bone express	114
5	Say Jesus and come to me : signifying and church food	135
6	Taking the big piece of chicken	165
7	Still dying for some soul food?	186
8	Flying the coop with Kara Walker	199
	Epilogue : from train depots to country buffets	219