A Few Rice Recipes. Respectfully Dedicated to Madam Good Housekeeper by The Rice Association of America.
Crowley, La. [The Association; Printed by] Signal Printing Co., [between September 1910 and March 1911].
Small booklet (14.75 x 9 cm.), 20 pages. Illustration. Printer from page [1]. Date range of publication determined from internal and external evidence. Cover title: The World Food, Rice: Eaten By All Peoples, Adapted to All Climes. ~ Evident FIRST EDITION. An attractive collection of recipes from Cajun Country (or Acadiana, as it has been dubbed since the 1960s), intended for distribution by mail upon request, and designed to promote the consumption of rice. A memento, too, of a particular feat of capitalist engineering leading to the emergence of a state-of-the-art agricultural industry. Includes hints for boiling and seasoning, and testimony regarding nutrition supplied by the United States Department of Agriculture. Among the twenty entries: Rice Gumbo Soup, Red Beans and Rice, Rice Jambalaya, Daube with Rice, Rice Waffles, Rice Custard. ~ The so-called Rice Belt along the Gulf assumed its profile during the era when risiculture in the Carolinas and Georgia was declining, above all in the decades following the Civil War. Most of the rice long cultivated on plantations of the South Atlantic had been for export to the United Kingdom and northern Europe – rice had never been a staple of the American diet – but competition there from developing Asian markets devastated the South Atlantic trade. Meanwhile a number of planters in the Gulf discerned cost advantages to shifting focus from sugar cane to rice. And in a fateful coincidence, by the mid-1880s the entire region began to attract the attention of agronomists and entrepreneurs from the Midwest (a significant number of them from or educated in Iowa) looking to invest in the sparsely populated coastal prairie, and especially in the southwestern third of Louisiana, that is, the twenty or so parishes inhabited chiefly by francophone Acadians. ~ But their project would need to include an expansion of the domestic market. Cooperative arrangements between corporate land speculators, settlement recruiters, and commercial promoters virtually invented a new industry out of whole cloth, uniting the interests of farmers, millers, and the burgeoning railroads (the overview on which this outline leans is that by Peter Coclanis, “White Rice: The Midwestern Origins of the Modern Rice Industry in the United States,” Rice: Global Networks and New Histories, edited by Francesca Bray (et al.) [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015], pages 291-317). A Few Rice Recipes is but one document, then, of a coordinated regime of marketing pamphlets, newspaper notices, farm-show exhibits, and sightseeing tours designed to advertise the benefits of rice consumption beyond the immediate orbit of Cajun Country. Not only did initiatives of largely Midwestern origin succeed in transforming the economy of southwestern Louisiana, but they also attracted government-funded support in the guise of experimental agriculture stations – evident here in quotations from reports by the Department of Agriculture. The Rice Association of America, finally, was one of the trade cooperatives organized in the 1890s by Seaman Knapp (1833-1911), a native of New York who had moved to Iowa in his youth to farm and to promote the interests of large-tract agriculture. Soon enough it would spawn the Rice Millers’ Association, which remains one of the oldest United States agribusiness trade groups in continuous operation. ~ Among the Iowans Knapp lured to Louisiana was the president of the Association whose name heads the list of officers on page [1] of A Few Rice Recipes, George Hathaway (1853-1935). He was elected in April 1910, but the span of months for the booklet’s appearance in print can be narrowed: a quotation from the September 1910 issue of the national newspaper Leslie’s Weekly occupies page 2; and the untimely death of Henry Kahn, a vice-president listed on page [1], was reported in newspaper notices to have occurred on 16 March 1911. ~ In stapled wrappers, with an illustration on the front panel depicting a girl nestled amongst rice culms and perched atop a globe showing the rice belt at its center. A bit of light rubbing to the wrappers; a small adhesion mark to the top of the rear panel, otherwise very good. Unrecorded. [OCLC locates no copies; not in Brown, Cagle, or Uhler].
Price: $900.00