Aunt Priscilla was a pseudonym for the columnist Eleanor Purcell of The Baltimore Sun. Purcell used the image of the Mammy archetype to create a cooking column called Aunt Priscilla's Recipes which was purported to be written by an African American woman. The daily column was written in an exaggerated dialect.
Aunt Priscilla purportedly was a daily food columnist for The Baltimore Sun and her column ran from the early 1920s through the 1940s.[1][2] The columns were written as answers to culinary requests from readers of the newspaper and described how to cook traditional Southern recipes.[3][4] The directions for the recipes were written with "inexperienced cooks or brides in mind," according to The Baltimore Sun.[2]
Aunt Priscilla's columns were written in a dialect similar to Uncle Remus, according to writer, Alice Furlaud.[5] Lisa Hix described the dialect as an "exaggerated slave dialect."[3] Each publication included an illustration of a woman that could be considered "Jemima-like," according to Toni Tipton-Martin.[4] In a 1951 book called The Amiable Baltimoreans, the author, Francis F. Beirne, refers to Aunt Priscilla as if she was a real person.[6]
In fact, the column was written by Eleanor Purcell, who was white.[7][5] Purcell's work, according to Tipton-Martin, "was a form of minstrelsy," but "it broke with the long tradition of simply taking and publishing African American recipes without giving black cooks credit."[3] Purcell started working at The Baltimore Sun in 1916 and Aunt Priscilla's Recipes was her first feature for the paper.[2]
In 1929, a compilation of recipes mostly featuring holiday themes was published. The book was called Aunt Priscilla in the Kitchen: A Collection of Wintertime Recipes.[5] The column and the book both "are full of nostalgia for the old slave-owning south," said Furlaud.[5] The Baltimore Sun wrote that the cookbook was "well received."[2]
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