The methodology of the culinary historian is well illustrated in the work of Karen Hess, who is renowned for her facsimile editions of Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery (1981), The Virginia House-Wife (1984), What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking (1995), and the Carolina Rice Cook Book, compiled by Mrs. Samuel G. Stoney, which is included in Hess’s study The Carolina Rice Kitchen: The African Connection (1992). In all of these works, Hess provides thoroughly researched introductions or afterwords, annotations, and notes that offer historical contexts to the recipes she examines and lead readers to important conclusions about the people who wrote the cookbook texts. In The Carolina Rice Kitchen, for instance, she successfully establishes the connections between the South Carolina rice culture and the early African American cooks who introduced such dishes as rice and bean pilafs.
