Christopher Hendricks
12:00 – 1:00 pm | Wednesday, June 11

What’s more homey and comforting than a recipe for “southern rice pie” from Mary Randolph’s 1824 cookbook, The Virginia House-Wife? On the surface, it’s a regional twist on rice pudding; underneath, it reveals the twin stories of the domestic craft of nineteenth-century women and the agricultural knowledge and labor of enslaved Africans. Christopher Hendricks’s cultural investigation addresses a “resourceful and talented woman with the desire to support her family” and the Africans “forcibly oppressed by those most dependent on their knowledge.”

Historian Christopher Hendricks is a professor at Georgia Southern University. He studied at Wake Forest University and the College of William and Mary and is the author of Old Southern Cookery: Mary Randolph’s Recipes from America’s First Regional Cookbook Adapted for Today’s Kitchen.