Culinary Colonialism, Caribbean Cookbooks, and Recipes for National Independence (Rutgers UP, 2024).
Women across the Caribbean have been writing, reading, and exchanging cookbooks since at least the turn of the nineteenth century. These cookbooks are about much more than cooking. Cookbooks, as Valens demonstrates, have shaped, embedded, and contested colonial and domestic orders, delineated the contours of independent national cultures, and transformed tastes for independence into flavors of domestic autonomy.