Women who prepared food for enslaved people, rather than enslavers, have been neglected in historical scholarship. Their labor within the quarters has been marginalized, belittled, and even ignored, because it fell within the remit of gendered care and nurture. In this book, Emily West illustrates how these mostly older women performed vital roles in slaveholding sites, as their enslavers increasingly tried to regulate food distribution, preparation, and consumption. Enslavers attempted to impose highly efficient, communal food regimes to minimize waste and time lost from work elsewhere. They routinely tasked older women with the feeding and care of infants, but also deployed them to prepare food for children and enslaved adults to eat collectively. Conversely, in the relative privacy of the quarters, where enslaved people preferred to eat, cooking became both a form of gendered exploitation, and an expression of love, empowerment, and pleasure.

‘Emily West chronicles the care work performed by Black women in the slave South in unprecedented and remarkably illuminating detail. The book emphasizes that African American women’s labor of care under slavery included not only finding ways to nurture their own families under adverse conditions, but also exploitive work for their enslavers. Cooking for the Quarters provides us with a new understanding of the many forms of labor imposed on enslaved women.’

Mia Bay - author of Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance

‘In this remarkable book, Emily West takes what has often been left as a sentence or a footnote to underscore how food cultures were enmeshed in the broader power dynamics of American slavery. West skillfully and sensitively shows the complex labor of care enslaved women undertook in slavery, but also how food practices spoke to diverse forms of resistance and refusal in the face of tremendous oppression. In doing so, she offers vital insights into intersecting forces of age, gender, and race in shaping everyday life in the antebellum South.’

David Stefan Doddington - author of Old Age and American Slavery

‘Cooking for the Quarters is a meticulously researched and intimate study of enslaved women’s labor of care. The book reveals how struggles over food, nourishment, and care became central sites of both domination and resistance under slavery. By placing food sovereignty, reproduction, and gendered labor at the center of slavery studies, this work makes an important contribution to the histories of slavery, capitalism, and Black women’s labor.’

Shannon C. Eaves - author of Sexual Violence and American Slavery: The Making of a Rape Culture in the Antebellum South

‘This is a groundbreaking examination. West meticulously excavates the lives and experiences of diverse enslaved women who cooked, nurtured, and tended to the nutritional needs of others while carefully navigating the paternalism, cruelty, and power exerted by enslavers. In the process, West disrupts the stereotypical myths of ‘Mammies’ and ‘Aunt Jemimas’ previously used to characterize these enslaved women and their everyday forms of care work for enslaved children, adults, and elders.’

Hilary N. Green - author of Unforgettable Sacrifice: How Black Communities Remembered the Civil War