Aunt Priscilla facts for kids
Aunt Priscilla was a made-up name, called a pseudonym, used by a newspaper writer named Eleanor Purcell. She wrote for The Baltimore Sun newspaper. Purcell created a cooking column called Aunt Priscilla's Recipes. The column pretended to be written by an African American woman. The writing often used a very exaggerated way of speaking.
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About Aunt Priscilla
Aunt Priscilla was a daily food columnist for The Baltimore Sun. Her column appeared in the newspaper from the early 1920s through the 1940s. The columns were written as answers to cooking questions from newspaper readers. They described how to cook traditional Southern recipes. The instructions were written for "inexperienced cooks or brides." This was according to The Baltimore Sun.
Who Was Aunt Priscilla?
The character of Aunt Priscilla was not a real person. She was created by Eleanor Purcell, who was a white writer. Purcell started working at The Baltimore Sun in 1916. Aunt Priscilla's Recipes was her first special article for the newspaper.
Some people have said that Purcell's work was a form of "minstrelsy." This was a type of entertainment where white performers often pretended to be Black people. They used exaggerated and often offensive stereotypes. However, Purcell's work also did something different. It started to give some credit to Black cooks. Before this, many African American recipes were published without mentioning the Black cooks who created them.
The Column and Its Style
Aunt Priscilla's columns were written in a made-up way of speaking. This was similar to the style used for a character called Uncle Remus. One writer described this as an "exaggerated slave dialect." This means it was a made-up way of talking that was used to create a character. It was not how real people spoke. Each column also included a drawing of a woman. This drawing looked like a Jemima-like character. This was a common stereotype of a Black woman, often shown as a cook.
In 1951, a book called The Amiable Baltimoreans was written. The author, Francis F. Beirne, wrote about Aunt Priscilla as if she were a real person.
A Cookbook for Readers
In 1929, a collection of recipes from the column was published. Most of these recipes were for holidays. The book was called Aunt Priscilla in the Kitchen: A Collection of Wintertime Recipes. Some people felt that the column and the book looked back at the old South in a way that ignored the difficult history of slavery. The Baltimore Sun newspaper said that the cookbook was "well received" by readers.
See Also
- Mammy archetype
- Stereotypes of African Americans
