Aunt Priscilla was a

pseudonym A pseudonym (; ) or alias () is a fictitious name that a person or group assumes for a particular purpose, which differs from their original or true name (orthonym). This also differs from a new name that entirely or legally replaces an individua ...

for the columnist Eleanor Purcell of ''

The Baltimore Sun ''The Baltimore Sun'' is the largest general-circulation daily newspaper based in the U.S. state of Maryland and provides coverage of local and regional news, events, issues, people, and industries. Founded in 1837, it is currently owned by Tr ...

''. Purcell used the image of the

Mammy archetype A mammy is a U.S. historical stereotype depicting black women who work in a white family and nurse the family's children. The fictionalized mammy character is often visualized as a larger-sized, dark-skinned woman with a motherly personality ...

to create a cooking column called ''Aunt Priscilla's Recipes'' which was purported to be written by an

African American African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of ens ...

woman. The daily column was written in an exaggerated dialect.

About

Aunt Priscilla purportedly was a daily food columnist for ''The Baltimore Sun'' and her column ran from the early 1920s through the 1940s. The columns were written as answers to

culinary Culinary arts are the cuisine arts of outline of food preparation, food preparation, cooking and food presentation, presentation of food, usually in the form of meals. People working in this field – especially in establishments such as res ...

requests from readers of the newspaper and described how to cook traditional Southern recipes. The directions for the recipes were written with "inexperienced cooks or brides in mind," according to ''The Baltimore Sun''. Aunt Priscilla's columns were written in a

dialect The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of Linguistics, linguistic phenomena: One usage refers to a variety (linguisti ...

similar to

Uncle Remus Uncle Remus is the fictional title character and narrator of a collection of African American folktales compiled and adapted by Joel Chandler Harris and published in book form in 1881. Harris was a journalist in post-Reconstruction era Atlanta, a ...

, according to writer,

Alice Furlaud Alice may refer to: * Alice (name), most often a feminine given name, but also used as a surname Literature * Alice (''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland''), a character in books by Lewis Carroll * ''Alice'' series, children's and teen books by ...

. Lisa Hix described the dialect as an "exaggerated slave dialect." Each publication included an illustration of a woman that could be considered " Jemima-like," according to Toni Tipton-Martin. In a 1951 book called ''The Amiable Baltimoreans'', the author, Francis F. Beirne, refers to Aunt Priscilla as if she was a real person. In fact, the column was written by Eleanor Purcell, who was white. Purcell's work, according to Tipton-Martin, "was a form of minstrelsy," but "it broke with the long tradition of simply taking and publishing African American recipes without giving black cooks credit." Purcell started working at ''The Baltimore Sun'' in 1916 and ''Aunt Priscilla's Recipes'' was her first feature for the paper. In 1929, a compilation of recipes mostly featuring holiday themes was published. The book was called ''Aunt Priscilla in the Kitchen: A Collection of Wintertime Recipes.'' The column and the book both "are full of nostalgia for the old slave-owning south," said Furlaud. ''The Baltimore Sun'' wrote that the cookbook was "well received."

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