Flora Mae Hunter (c. 1910-2003) cooked for royalty, government officials, and wealthy business magnates. After decades of working in a kitchen, she immortalized her famed dishes in a beloved cookbook.
Flora Mae Hunter (c. 1910-2003) cooked for royalty, government officials, and wealthy business magnates. After decades of working in a kitchen, she immortalized her famed dishes in a beloved cookbook.
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Hello! From Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan. This is Womanica.
This month, we're highlighting women who've led dynamic lives. Ones that have shifted, evolved and bloomed, often later in life.
Today’s Womanican cooked for royalty, government officials, and wealthy business magnates. After decades of working in a kitchen, she immortalized her famed dishes in a beloved cookbook. Please welcome Flora Mae Hunter.
Flora was born Flora Mae Ross on the Springhill Plantation in Thomas County, Georgia, around 1910. Things were changing in that region, known as the Red Hills – an area of land spanning southern Georgia and Northern Florida. After the Civil War, Southern planters and plantation-owners in the area were bought out by wealthy Northerners looking for winter homes. Plenty of game made the region into a prime location for winter hunting.
Flora’s family was part of a strong African-American community in the area. Many of them worked at the former plantations-turned-hunting retreats.
Flora’s mother, Lessie, worked in the kitchen, and her father, Eddie, was a handyman. They moved across the border to Leon County, Florida, when Flora was a baby, to work at the Sunny Hill Plantation. There, Lessie became head cook.
By the time Flora was 15, she had joined her mother’s profession and began her lifelong study of cooking. Lessie passed down recipes and techniques to Flora, the same as her mother had done for her.
At 18, Flora got her a job working as a cook at Foshalee Plantation. She traveled north with her employers on trips to Ohio and Ontario, but she always returned to Florida. In 1933, she married Peter Hunter. He worked at the nearby Horseshoe Plantation, where the couple would continue working for more than thirty years.
Horseshoe Plantation stretched across more than 12,000 acres. It was especially busy during fall and winter, when northerners came to hunt and spend the cold months in a warmer climate.
Flora quickly became known as the best cook in the region. She expertly cooked quail, and rice cakes. And she came up with her own recipe, Horseshoe Eggs, which was a riff on deviled eggs.
Every morning, the kitchen offered at least 13 different breakfast menus. Flora also created lunch meals for all the guests’ different schedules: warm lunches for those at the plantation, and pre-packaged lunches for the hunting parties. Flora’s husband Peter would cook those on an open flame on the hunting grounds.
Flora was cooking for both her employer’s tastes as well as the household staff. This helped her master a wide array of recipes – what some historians have come to call “culinary code switching.” In one cookbook entry, Flora served pigtail pilau with fried okra and peach cobbler for the workers. Meanwhile, the guests feasted on turtle soup, pan-broiled venison, and tapioca pudding.
Flora and Peter retired around 1970 to a house near Horseshoe. There, Flora started to compile her recipes into an all-encompassing cookbook. She translated what she cooked from memory into discrete amounts and cooking temperatures. But, despite her fame as a cook, publishers weren’t interested. In 1978, she told the local newspaper that she didn’t have the means to self-publish, either.
Word got around to Thelma Thurston Gorham, a professor at Florida A&M University. Thelma took on Flora’s book as a project, working with a librarian and a graphic artist to edit and illustrate the book. The owner of a small local company took on the challenge to print it.
In 1979, “Born in the Kitchen: Plain and Fancy Plantation Fixin’s” was published. It chronicles the menus and recipes Flora created during her time at Horseshoe, including staple Southern meals and the ways she adjusted them for the Plantation’s guests. The book was meant for cooks of all levels– some recipes included ready-made ingredients from supermarkets, while others instructed readers on how to scale fish. It centralized the kitchen as a place of knowledge and experience, where Flora offered a lifetime of expertise.
As food journalist Toni Tipton-Martin once wrote, Flora “changed the record of what it meant to be a Black cook in the face of the Aunt Jemima stereotype.”
In 1988, nine years after her book’s publication, the state of Florida honored Flora with a Folk Heritage Award. It was an honor that she never expected. She told the local paper “I’ve never been so surprised in all my life.”
Flora died in 2003, in her nineties.
All month, we’re highlighting the stories of dynamos. For more information, find us on Facebook and Instagram @womanicapodcast.
Special thanks to Liz Kaplan, my favorite sister and co-creator.
Talk to you tomorrow!