Edible Witness: Emily Meggett’s Gullah Geechee Home Cooking as Cultural Testimony

Abstract

This article reads Emily Meggett’s Gullah Geechee Home Cooking: Recipes from the Matriarch of Edisto Island (2022) as a form of cultural and historical testimony. I introduce the concept of “edible witness” to analyze how culinary texts produced by marginalized communities function not as peripheral artifacts but as embodied acts of knowledge-making and resistance to erasure. Drawing on Paul Connerton’s work on incorporated memory, bell hooks’s theorization of the domestic sphere as a site of political struggle, and Felman and Laub’s relational approach to testimony, I examine the structural and rhetorical features of Meggett’s cookbook—its title, dedication, prefatory sections, and visual elements—to show how they collectively challenge dominant American narratives and reclaim Gullah Geechee culinary authorship. I also consider what is at stake when Gullah recipes transition from oral tradition to written form, and how Black Southern cuisine becomes a site of contested authenticity amid ongoing cultural appropriation. Ultimately, I position Meggett’s work as a powerful counter-narrative that insists on recognizing and preserving the stories and contributions of the Gullah Geechee people.