Haley to Present Program on Food Ways of the South Oct. 4

Dr. Andrew P. Haley, associate professor of history at The University of Southern Mississippi (USM), will present “Chicken Spaghetti and Other Culinary Conceits: Cooking and Class in the 20^th Century South” Thursday, Oct. 4 beginning at 6:30 p.m. in Cook Library, room 123. Members of the university and local communities are invited to attend this free event.  

The program will also feature potluck snacks from recipes in the Columbia, Miss.'s As You Like It Club Cook Book (https://digitalcollections.usm.edu/uncategorized/digitalFile_2ef9e375-846a-49c5-834c-62916dfc6ad1/), beginning at 6 p.m.

Dr. Haley's areas of expertise includes food, class and culture in the U.S., from the Gilded Age through the 1950s. He is the James Beard award-winning author of Turning the Tables: American Restaurant Culture and the Rise of the Middle Class, 1880-1920.  Haley's lecture will examine community cookbooks, daily dining and social class in Mississippi, borne from his ongoing research into Mississippi's unique culinary heritage and work with the Mississippi Community Cookbook Project.

“How people ate has the potential of to teach us who they were, but the clues found in cookbooks and memoirs are not easily deciphered,” Dr. Haley said. “I love speaking at the Universities Libraries because I always meet people whose life experiences teach me lessons about the past, and the food is great as well.”

Four years ago, Dr. Haley and Jennifer Brannock, University Libraries' Curator of Rare Books and Mississippiana, began collecting Mississippi cookbooks with the goal of preserving the state's culinary and local histories. The collection now includes approximately 1,000 cookbooks.

“Every year, we look forward to Dr. Haley's amazing talks about aspects of Mississippi history as seen through cookbooks,” Brannock said. “This year's talk is bound to be as interesting as the previous ones.”

For more information, contact Brannock at jennifer.brannockFREEMississippi.