Fulbright author shares stories of African American foodways at home and abroad through Recipes for Respect
Dr. Rafia Zafar, PhD
Scholar of Literature and African American Studies
Fulbright U.S. Scholar to the Netherlands
Dr. Rafia Zafar, PhD, is professor emerita at Washington University in St. Louis and wrote Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning to trace the rich history of the Black men and women “who wrote, planted and cooked their way into new positions in American life.” It illuminates the role of food writing in African American culture and the important contributions of Black cooks and chefs.
Recipes for Respect recounts the stories of enslaved and recently freed people in the 19th and 20th century United States who earned accolades through their talents in the kitchen, and traces the influences of cookbook writers and novelists through the Civil Rights era. It explores narratives ranging from domestic manuals published in the 1820s by some of the earliest known Black cookbooks authors (Abby Fisher, Robert Roberts, Malinda Russell and Rufus Estes), to Black Power cookbooks in the 1970s. Zafar discusses famous figures such as George Washington Carver, who advocated for farm to table eating, as well as lesser-known influences such as Thomas Bullock, the bartender at the St. Louis Country Club who authored a guide to being “The Ideal Bartender.” She also brings to light an unpublished cookbook of Arturo Schomburg, whose African diasporic collection grew to become the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. Zafar explains how African Americans chefs and cooks used their position as authors, as well as their knowledge of the culinary arts, “to support civil rights and social mobility.” Zafar argues that cookbooks written by and for African Americans do more than provide cooking instructions, they are narratives that create “recipes for respect.”
Zafar was a Fulbright U.S. Scholar to the Netherlands and became the Walt Whitman Distinguished Fulbright Chair in American Studies at the University of Utrecht in Spring 2007. Zafar describes how in the early 2000s, world events prompted growing belief in the importance of adopting a global perspective in American Studies research and writing. Gaining outside views of the United States deepened her understanding of its impact on the world. “The American Studies Association had begun a push for the internationalization of American Studies—to get away from looking at the U.S. from a U.S. perspective only,” Zafar explains, “and living in Utrecht afforded me that lens.”
As a Fulbright Scholar, she taught a graduate course in American Studies focused on food, race, and ethnicity in American literature, and an undergraduate English course on The Harlem Renaissance. She began working on essays that would later appear in Recipes for Respect. One originated as a lecture she delivered at Leiden University. The talk was on Ernest Gaines’s A Gathering of Old Men, a novel set in and around a Louisiana cane farm. Zafar’s lecture at Leiden, on how Gaines described shared or withheld meals between Cajuns and Black agricultural workers in his novel, illustrating patterns of racial discrimination in the post-civil rights era South. Eventually her remarks grew into the chapter, “Civil rights and commensality: meals and meaning in Ernest Gaines, Anne Moody, and Alice Walker.”
Zafar says that her experience in the Netherlands “affirmed my advice to my students—go abroad, study abroad—while you’re still in college. You might never have the chance again, or not for a long time.” After telling them that for decades, she decided to follow her own advice. “My Fulbright experience empowered me to get out of my U.S. academic bubble and see what students and classes are like in other countries,” she explained.
Prior to her Fulbright, Zafar’s professional and academic experience had been largely centered in the United States. A graduate of the City College of New York and Columbia University, she earned a PhD in the history of American civilization from Harvard. She taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor with a Ford Foundation postdoctoral fellowship before embarking on a distinguished career at Washington University in St. Louis.
Having the opportunity to teach students outside of the United States led Zafar to reflect more deeply about what being an American meant to her, and provided a richer perspective on both the tragic and triumphal aspects of African American history.
Recipes for Respect received positive reviews from publications such as the Wall Street Journal and the Detroit Free Press and brought Zafar into the spotlight, leading her to reach new audiences through numerous media interviews and invitations to speak and teach about African American foodways on an international stage. In recent years, Zafar has continued to share her expertise globally, including teaching a seminar on Black Foodways at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy each spring. Once she understood that she could give her classes in English—as she had as a Fulbright professor in the Netherlands—she “jumped in with both feet.” In 2024, she was also a visiting professor at Turku University in Finland, and she presented a talk on her research accompanied by a cooking demonstration at University of Toronto Scarborough’s Culinaria Research Centre.
Most recently, Zafar contributed a short essay to When Southern Women Cook, by America’s Test Kitchen, a collection of both recipes and essays. In 2025, University of Michigan plans to publish her foreword to the only modern edition of A Domestic Cook Book (1866) by Malinda Russell, the first African American woman known to have published a cookbook in the United States.
Now that Zafar has retired back to New York, where she was born and raised, she says she is eager to get involved in the food scene in her old “home town.